


no flaws when you're pretending

by endocarp



Category: Persona 3, Persona 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Tragedy, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Depression, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, M/M, Mental Instability, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Self-Harm, Sexual Harassment, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-17 04:52:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 30,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9305582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endocarp/pseuds/endocarp
Summary: AU where the mistake that got Adachi transferred to the sticks was assisting the Special Extracurricular Execution Squad by illegally selling them weapons. He won't leave Makoto alone.





	1. Chapter 1

Makoto shuffles into the mall police station after Junpei, hands tucked in his pockets as usual. The volume on his MP3 player is turned down to a quiet murmur, so  that he can hear people talking. Akihiko is wrapping up a conversation with the police officer at the desk.

"Thank you, sir--" Akihiko glances over his shoulder at Junpei and Makoto. "Oh, these are the guys I was talking about earlier," he says cheerfully.

The police officer, who looks about as rumpled and bored as Makoto-- this is an impressive accomplishment-- glances up at them. He's got his feet up on the desk and his chair leaned back and a dog-eared book open on his lap. Makoto nods, a quick jerk of his chin, and doesn't introduce himself. His eyes flick over the man-- boring, not much to look at-- and fix on his hair. It's terrible. He definitely cuts it himself, possibly without looking in a mirror. It sticks up all over the place, and some bits are longer than others in a way that doesn't look at all intentional.

Akihiko elbows Junpei and says, "I was waiting for you guys. This is Officer Adachi. He helps keep our squad well-equipped." He fishes some money out of his pocket and hands Makoto and Junpei 5,000 yen each. "This is from Ikutsuki-san. You can't fight empty-handed, so... find something you like. Officer Adachi has connections, but these things still cost money."

"Of course they do! Nothing in life is free," Adachi says, with a faux-stern look on his face. It's not very convincing. It seems like he might be doing an impression of somebody's dad. Makoto snorts. Akihiko doesn't seem to notice it's a joke, though.

"I realize that," he says, too seriously. Then he claps Junpei on the shoulder, thanks Adachi again, and leaves.

Makoto fiddles with his money and stares silently at Adachi for a while. Adachi arches his eyebrows at him. "You want a sword or what?" he asks.

Makoto shrugs, keeping his hands firmly in his pockets. After another long pause-- Adachi returns his attention to his book-- he asks, "...What're you reading?"

"Eh? Oh." Adachi holds up his book; the cover is a rose-tinted photograph of a young girl in a short skirt leaning against a tree. You can only see her from the waist down; just two long thin pale legs. Makoto squints. _Lolita_ by Nabokov.

"It's good," Adachi says, lowering the book and returning his attention to reading. "Ever read it?"

Makoto shakes his head. He hasn't. He doesn't really like reading that much. Also, he's pretty sure he knows what it's about.

...This guy seems sketchy.

Adachi shrugs loosely. "If you're not too busy with schoolwork, you should. It's a classic. Anyway... Sanada said you needed weapons, right? I'm not gonna ask, so don't tell me. Probably better I don't know the details, right?" He smiles crookedly.

Makoto shrugs again and says, "Fighting Shadows in the Dark Hour. We're not gonna hurt any people. Probably."

Adachi wrinkles his nose and glances ruefully at the ceiling. "Man... wish you hadn't said _that_. Now I'm obligated to keep an eye on you as an officer of the law," he says. "You could be a menace to public safety."

Makoto tilts his head to the side, hair falling into his face. "...Sorry."

"I'm joking. Lighten up, kid," Adachi leans back in his chair, smiling crookedly at Makoto. "Anyone ever tell you you're too gloomy?"

Makoto stares blankly at him for a while, then shrugs and says, "Whatever," and buys a shitty sword.


	2. Chapter 2

It's late.

Makoto gets back after dark, headphones on, hands in his pockets. Akihiko and a few others are downstairs; Mitsuru is reading a newspaper, Junpei is flipping a coin and catching it, Yukari is doing homework. Akihiko raises a hand and says, distractedly, "Welcome back."

It seems more like a reaction to the door opening and closing than to Makoto's actual presence. "I'm back," he says quietly. He makes a circuit of the room, says hello to everyone. Nobody wants to talk to him. Nobody asks what he's been doing since he left school. They do want to go to Tartarus; the thought of going back there, to the cold endless slog through floor after floor of exhausting nonstop fighting, is less than appealing. He mumbles a vague "no," turns on his heel, and leaves.

Nobody ever asks him where he's going. He clips his headphones to his ears and sticks his hands in his pockets and walks, aimlessly, until he winds up at the mall. Not much else to do at night, besides go to the mall. There's no reason for the mall to be open so late, because nobody's _there_ , but there you go. One of those things about Iwatodai.

Makoto tries to think of the quiet as peaceful, but really it's eerie. The whole city feels like it's dying. Everywhere feels like it's waiting to be torn down and rebuilt. Everything in Iwatodai City was trendy, once, but isn't any more. Sometimes it seems like no one in the entire city is happy. Music helps a little.

Like everywhere else, the mall is just about empty. Makoto slouches in, music blasting a little too loud, and glances around. Arcade's closed. Too late at night. He shuffles his feet and rolls his shoulders back, then scratches his leg with his foot and slouches over to the gossiping housewives. "Hey. What're you talking about?" he says, tilting his head to the side and unclipping his headphones. He lets them hang around his neck, still blasting music, and tucks his hands back in his pockets. Then he just stands there.

"I heard someone saw Tanaka-san here the other day," says one of the housewives. "You know, from the shopping channel!"

"Really? _Here?_ Oh, my... we don't get many celebrities around here," says the other one. She looks at Makoto. "You know, you look like you could be a model," she adds, and giggles a little.

"Thanks," Makoto says, tonelessly. "Bye."

He slouches away, leaving them to their conversation, and looks around for something more substantial to do. Club Escapade, maybe. Maybe there will be someone to talk to there. He takes three steps towards the door, and...

Officer Adachi jogs over and blocks his path. "Hey, kid! Hold up! Where d'you think you're going?"

Makoto blinks up at Adachi, expression as sullen and flat as ever. He leans to the side and points at the door to Escapade. "...The club," he says.

"Yeah, that's what it looked like. What are you, like... fifteen?" Adachi folds his arms over his chest. He's trying to look stern, but he's a little too hapless to pull it off. He's too young; he gives off substitute teacher/babysitter vibes. The kind of authority figure that doesn't have any real authority. Also, he's clearly trying not to look amused. Adachi leans to the side to block Makoto's line of sight. "You can't go in there," he says, and scratches the back of his neck, glancing over his shoulder at the club. "...Between you and me, you probably don't want to anyway. It's always dead."

"Okay." Makoto doesn't have the energy or inclination to press the subject. He'll just try again when Adachi's not working. Adachi seems to relax a little. If he can't go to the club... Makoto's eyes drift over to the karaoke place, then back to Adachi. He rocks back on his heels. "...You wanna hang out?"

Adachi looks mildly surprised. He raises his eyebrows and glances over at his weird mall police station. "With me...? Are you really that desperate for company? Don't you have something better to do?"

Makoto _is_ really that desperate for company and he _does not_ have something better to do. He could go do karaoke by himself, or he could walk around the city until his feet hurt too much and he has to go home and pass out facefirst in bed. Makoto shrugs, glancing away. "You can say no," he says dully.

Adachi looks at him for a long moment, then exhales an amused breath and says, "I guess if it'll keep you out of trouble, I have a responsibility as an officer of the law to say _yes_. C'mon, then. Keep me company while I work."

He walks off back to his mall police station, flicking his jacket back to tuck his hands into his pants pockets as he goes. There's a badge and a holstered gun on his belt. Makoto's eyes catch on them as he follows him, jogging a little to keep up. Adachi's legs are much longer than his.

"Gekkoukan, right?" Adachi says, holding the door for him with the tips of his long fingers. He glances over his shoulder at Makoto with a strange detached mix of interest and noninterest. "Rich kid or charity case?"

Makoto sidles past him and glances around. There's posters on the countertop, and lockers behind it. Tables with papers and computers. A map of the area on the wall. A door to a back room. Some potted plants. Adachi beckons him behind the counter and pulls up a chair for him with his foot, then sits down in a rolling chair and leans over one of the tables. He seems to be working on cutting out coupons from some newspapers. Is that the "work" he was talking about...?

Makoto sits down, hands still in his pockets, and peers at the coupons. After a very long pause, he says, "Charity case. What's it like being a mallcop?"

"I'm not a mallcop, I'm a cop who happens to work in a mall," Adachi says archly, eyes flicking up from his coupons. "This area has a lot of crime. Lot of delinquents hang out nearby. Drunks in the club, shoplifting, drunks at karaoke, homeless people, drunks at the arcade..."

Makoto nods. Adachi clips a few more coupons. "A lot of really boring work. A lot of wrestling. A lot of getting yelled at. It's a drag," he says. He sounds bored. Keeps clipping coupons. Makoto sits on the edge of his seat staring at the coupons. Adachi tilts his head to the side. "Don't you have friends?"

"I have a lot of friends," Makoto says. He's pretty sure he has a lot of friends. He's got a lot of Social Links. SEES are his friends. Probably. He crosses his ankles. Adachi keeps cutting out coupons with a practiced ease. He must do this a lot.

Adachi looks up at him again, expectantly. "...So?" he prompts.

Makoto gives him a blank look and echoes, "...So?"

" _So,_ " Adachi says, mouth twitching into an amused smile. "What're you doing in a dingy shopping mall this late at night?" He tilts his head to the side, narrowing his eyes a little bit. "Lot of shady characters about. You oughta be careful."

Makoto stares at him. "Like you?"

Adachi blinks, apparently uninterested in a staring contest. "Eh?" He points at his own face. "Do I seem shady?"

"Very," Makoto says firmly.


	3. Chapter 3

Tartarus is cold, and every noise echoes off the strange glassy surfaces in the lobby. They only have an hour, but that hour never seems to pass the way hours are supposed to. It feels like they've been here an hour already, standing around talking. Makoto's been carefully inspecting their equipment.

"Since Yuki-kun's the leader, he should be in charge of buying everyone's weapons," Akihiko says, adjusting the wrist strap on his gloves. Makoto's eyes fix on the teleportation device in the corner of the lobby, headphones hanging uselessly around his neck. No electronics in the Dark Hour. "From Officer Adachi, you know."

"Yeah, fine by me. That guy is _so_ creepy," Yukari says, wrinkling her nose and crossing her arms over her chest. "Every time I go near that place I can practically feel him eyeing me up. It's so gross."

"Whaaat? Seriously?" Junpei, for some reason, seems surprised. Makoto is not.

"Yes, seriously!" Yukari says. "ou know, I heard this girl in our year got her bag stolen and when she went to report it he tried to get her to give him her phone number!"

Makoto sifts through his growing collection of weird shirts and tosses one to Yukari. "This one's better than the one you have on," he says. Then he adds, without any change in tone, "I'll buy the weapons if no one else wants to. Adachi's weird. I think we're friends."

"That's settled, then," Mitsuru says briskly.

The Dark Hour in Tartarus is miserable. It feels longer than normal hours. Normal Dark Hours, too. Time distorts, drags, stretches on and on and on. Floor after identical floor of fighting, opening boxes, strange reflective surfaces burning his eyes, atmosphere draining their energy faster the longer they stay there.

Makoto finds some weird garbage in a box and eats it, vaguely hoping it'll make him sick. It doesn't. They all stagger home exhausted, and he falls asleep as soon as he's in bed. Tartarus is a miserable slog, and his absolute least favorite way to spend an evening.

After school the next day he goes straight to the mall to buy some more weapons. Adachi greets him with a lazy wave and says, "Hey, kid. How's school?"

Makoto shrugs, inspecting Adachi's pile of swords. "Slept through most of it. Did you really ask for a high school girl's number when she came to report a purse-snatching?"

"Did someone say that?" Adachi leans back in his chair, raising his eyebrows. His tone light and somewhat exasperated, like he just can't _believe_ anyone would suggest anything untoward, he says, "I ask everyone who's seen a crime for their phone number. And their address, and their ID. What, did she think I was hitting on her or something? _Yikes._ "

This guy, Makoto concludes, is shady in the extreme. It's probably for the best nobody else talks to him. Makoto holds up a rapier to look at it shining in the buzzing fluorescent light. Adachi sits up, chair clicking back into an upright position, and says, "Hey, come on, kid, don't wave it around like that. You're gonna get one or both of us into trouble."

"Sorry." Makoto drops the sword back onto the pile with a loud clang. He tucks his hands back in his pockets and just stares at the assorted weapons instead. The buzzing fluorescent light feels too loud. He feels like he hasn't had a real conversation all day, and the quiet prickles uncomfortably at his skin. He runs his tongue over his teeth inside his mouth (when did he last brush them? a week ago?) then asks, "...How come you're helping us?"

"Because the Kirijo Group's paying me to," Adachi says, leaning his elbows on the desk and looking up at Makoto. The strange dim interest in Adachi's eyes is almost as uncomfortable as silence. It feels like Adachi _wants_ something from him, but he can't tell what. It's a similar feeling to when an enemy casts a charm spell on everyone, and he feels the weird tug but it doesn't quite work. "...They pay you, too, right?"

"Nah. We find money in Tartarus," Makoto says. Speaking of: he fishes a thick roll of cash out of his pocket and starts counting out the money for a new bow for Yukari. He points at the one he wants. He adds, "A lot of it." He'd smirk, but that feels like too much work. He hasn't had the energy to muster up a facial expression in about a week.

"Huh. That's pretty good," Adachi says. He hands over the bow and takes Makoto's money, then leans his chair all the way back again. "Hey, do you really live in a co-ed dorm?"

"Yup," Makoto says. He leans the bow against the counter and clips his headphones on, staring dully at Adachi. "You can't come over. That'd be weird."

Adachi widens his eyes in feigned innocent surprise and says, "Wha-- I was just making conversation! I'm not some kind of pervert!"

Makoto shrugs. "If you say so. Gotta run. I have track."

" _You_ do sports?" Adachi asks, eyes flicking skeptically over him. "Color me surprised. You didn't seem the type."

"I love sports," Makoto says, with the same flat monotone he says everything. He isn't being sarcastic, but it's difficult for anyone to actually tell. Since he doesn't have the energy for a smile, still, he gives Adachi a thumbs up to try and indicate his sincerity. Adachi exhales an amused breath and puts his feet up on his desk.

"You look like you're gonna keel over if you try to move any faster than a sedate stroll," he says, and waves his hand dismissively. "Go do sports, then. See you around."


	4. Chapter 4

Sundays aren't great. Makoto stumbles downstairs a few hours past dark, pale and bleary-eyed. He hasn't spoken to anyone out loud since Friday. He hasn't eaten since then.

"Oh, hey, I didn't realize you were home," Yukari says, glancing over at him. "Have you just been in your room all day...?"

Makoto walks straight to the door without talking to anyone, clipping his headphones on, and is immediately drenched in the pouring rain. His fingers press against his earphones, pausing for a moment. He closes his eyes and exhales. The abrupt soaking helps wake him up, a little. He feels a little like he's been asleep for several days.

It doesn't occur to him until he's halfway to the train station that he could have gone back and gotten an umbrella. By that point, the rain has soaked through his clothes and it would be pointless. His hair sticks to his face and neck. He drips all over the floor of the train. No one else is on the train.

There's only one place to go, this late, he realizes. The clock on the train tells him it's nine PM. Everything's closed except the mall, so he goes to the mall, and drips on the floor there. It's air conditioned in the mall, for some god damn reason, and he's soaked to the bone; he starts shivering almost immediately, and tries not to think about Tartarus. His headphones break on the way; they just stop working, probably because of the rain. He lets them hang uselessly around his neck.

Makoto goes to the pharmacy and stares at medicine for a long time, then buys several containers of some rather dubious store-brand 'Medical Powder.' It looks useful, and he thinks dimly that he might get sick from this stupid rain expedition.

"Hang on," he says to the cashier. He takes one of his change bills-- dry, unlike the ones in his pocket-- rolls it up, and snorts a line of medical powder off the pharmacy checkout counter.

The cashier rolls her eyes and says, "You're supposed to mix it with water and drink it."

Makoto tucks his money into his pocket, and the little tins of powder, and gives her a flat look. Scratching absentmindedly behind his ear, he says, in his usual dull monotone, "That wouldn't be as baller."

She looks at him like she can't tell if he's joking or not. He gets that a lot. "Thanks for your purchase," she says. He shrugs and leaves.

He's still hungry and shivering when he slouches back into the main area of the Paulownia Mall. Coffee, maybe. Coffee's sort of like food. Instead of the café, Makoto drifts to the crane game outside the arcade. He presses his forehead against the glass and plays for a while, movements mechanical and tired. Somewhere after his 5th attempt-- he lost count-- Adachi seems to appear out of nowhere, leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, staring at him.

Makoto doesn't jump, though he is startled. He stops playing the crane game and looks at Adachi, face still pressed against the glass of the game. "...Hey."

"You look terrible," Adachi says. "Why don't you have an umbrella? Or a coat?"

"I didn't know it was raining," Makoto says, tucking his hands into his pockets. He glances down at the water on the floor near his feet. It's pooling weirdly in the scuffs and scratches in the once-pristine surface of the floor.

"It's been raining all day," Adachi says. He looks Makoto over with his usual strange flat appraising interest. "What's with that? Is your 'co-ed dorm' actually an underground bunker or something?"

Makoto just shrugs. He doesn't have an answer better than _I didn't know it was raining._ He has a window in his room. He has been awake all day. He just didn't notice.

"You're a really weird kid, you know that?" Adachi rubs his neck and sighs. "I'd offer you my umbrella, but I don't wanna get rained on."

"Cool," Makoto says. His eyes drift over to the café. They don't have any real food there. Just pastries. And it's late, so probably hardly any of those, even. "I'm hungry. You got any food?"

"Not on me," Adachi sounds amused. He pauses, looking at Makoto with an unreadable expression, then slouches and combs his hand through his hair. "I was gonna grab takeout on my way home. You wanna come with? I could drop you off near the bridge."

Makoto blinks slowly at Adachi, then looks at his watch. It's still a few hours before midnight. If he goes home now, without killing time first, he'll have to go to Tartarus. He glances back up at Adachi, wondering dimly if he actually needs to be worried about Adachi murdering him or something. It's a very vague notion, though, and he concludes that it seems unlikely and he doesn't care that much. "I don't like eating alone," he says.

"You could eat with your dormmates," Adachi suggests mildly.

Makoto considers this. Could he eat with SEES? He would have to get enough food for all of them. He doesn't know what Akihiko would want. They probably wouldn't want to eat with him anyway. They didn't seem hungry. "Nah," he says.

Adachi blinks at him for a long time. "Well, whatever. I guess we could eat at my place." He points at Makoto with a serious look, eyebrows raised. "I'm taking you home right after, though."

Makoto is relieved, though of course he doesn't look it. He says, "Cool."

He walks close enough to Adachi to be covered by his umbrella, hands in his pockets. It's strange, being that close to another person. Adachi hardly seems to notice. Makoto sits in the front seat of Adachi's beat-up old car, twirling his headphone cord around his finger and staring out the window. Adachi does not put on any music.

"So," Adachi says. "How's school? That's the sort of thing I should ask about, right?" He laughs a little, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. "I don't hang out with kids much."

"No siblings?" Makoto asks, eyes flicking away from the dreary empty streets to inspect Adachi's car. Somehow he'd imagined there would be more garbage, but it's quite tidy. There's books stacked on the backseat-- three in English, four in Japanese-- and there's a shirt and jacket draped over the back of the seat, wrinkled but mostly in good shape. Adachi's bag-- plain black leather, worn out, broken zipper, no decorations or charms or anything-- is near Makoto's feet. There's no CDs or trash or anything like that. He doesn't have any decorations on his car keys, either.

"One older sister," Adachi says. A dead-eyed bitter look flickers over his face. "We don't get along. At all. She's eight years older than I am. I haven't spoken to her since..." His face smooths back into bland neutrality as his eyes flick up thoughtfully. "Must've been my cousin's wedding... so... two years ago, now, I think."

Makoto thinks about that. He doesn't have any siblings. There have been other kids in foster homes, but none of them were _his siblings._ If he did, he thinks he'd want to talk to them. Two years is a long time to not talk to somebody. He presses his forehead against the cold damp window. "Do you miss her?"

"Noooo way," Adachi laughs dryly. "She's _awful_. We hate each other."

Makoto can't think of anything else to say. Adachi hands him his cellphone and tells him to order food while he drives; Makoto mumbles their order in a dull monotone, the same way he says everything. The drive to Adachi's building is pretty short from the restaurant; his apartment is, like his car, tidy and strangely barren.

"You want a shirt or something?" Adachi asks, toeing off his shoes as he steps into his apartment. He shrugs off his jacket and drops his keys on a little table near the door, stumbling towards his low plain table. "A dry one, I mean."

"Whatever," Makoto says, leaning against the wall and pulling off his shoes. "I'm probably gonna get sick either way."

"Well, just in case." Adachi throws a plain white t-shirt at him anyway, then flops onto the floor and snaps apart a pair of chopsticks. It comes out uneven; he makes a little face, looking vaguely disappointed. Makoto fiddles with the shirt for a moment, but it's dry and his shirt is sticking to his chest and it doesn't matter that much. This feels weird, and he wonders again if Adachi is planning on kidnapping him or selling him to criminals or something. He doesn't go to anybody's house, usually.

Makoto puts on the shirt and hangs up his damp shirt on a coathook near the door, then sits down across the table from Adachi. When he starts eating, Adachi pauses, eyes flicking over him. "So you seem pretty miserable. You know, existentially. What's with that?" he asks.

Normally Makoto would shrug off something like that, but something about being _noticed_ trips him up. No one in SEES ever seems to pick up on the fact that he feels like shit all the time. Nobody at school notices, either. People say he seems sullen or gloomy, but nobody ever seems to make the logical leap that it might mean he feels terrible. Except this weirdo. Makoto keeps eating his lo mein, chewing slowly. It should have a taste, he thinks, but it doesn't. Well. It does. But he can't really feel it. It doesn't register.

It's difficult to think of a response to _what's with that._ Makoto pushes the noodles in the carton around with his chopsticks and says, eventually, "I'm dead inside, I guess." He's not sure what kind of a response that'll get. He doesn't have to wait long.

"Haha. Me too." Adachi's eyes flick away, his smile crooked and dry. Makoto isn't sure if he's uncomfortable with that response or not. It registers dimly as inappropriate, but at least it's not _dismissive._ Makoto gazes owlishly at Adachi for another long moment, then fixes his eyes back on the food.

"Why didn't you just go home and eat?" Adachi asks, after a brief silence.

"We don't have any food," Makoto says, and punctuates it with a shrug. His eyes flick briefly up to Adachi's face; he looks bemused. Makoto clarifies: "We have a kitchen, but nothing in it. Nobody uses it."

"Huh," is all Adachi says to that. Makoto looks at him again, to find that Adachi is giving him another one of those appraising looks. This time there's something like concern wrinkling his eyebrows together. Maybe. It's hard to say; every feeling Adachi expresses feels artificial and strange. There's something weirdly fascinating about it.

"I haven't eaten anything since Friday," Makoto says, watching Adachi's face for his reaction. There's a delay. Not a long one, but it's there; he doesn't _react_ , not quite. No one would notice if they weren't looking for it specifically. There's a distinct pause before Adachi pulls his eyebrows into a concerned little frown.

"Nothing at all? That's no good," Adachi says. He points at Makoto with his chopsticks. "You gotta eat, kiddo. You'll stunt your growth."

Makoto is pretty sure Adachi is a sociopath. He decides to keep an eye on that. "...Whatever." He returns his attention to eating. "Buy me food and I'll eat it."

Adachi snorts and shakes his head. "You're such a brat," he says. That much seems real enough. "Eat your food, Oliver Twist."

Makoto spends a while eating food with Adachi and talking a little, and then Adachi drives him to the train station. Lends him his umbrella, too, so Makoto's not soaked when he gets back to the dorm.


	5. Chapter 5

They keep acquiring people. They keep fighting Shadows. Time rushes by all blurry and unimportant. Summer is gone in a blink of an eye. He doesn't even remember most of it. Makoto only gets more tired. He's sick most of the time. Nobody seems to care that much. SEES continue to not particularly care about much to do with him. They don't really seem to care how he spends his time, even when he refuses to go to Tartarus. Junpei and Akihiko barely speak to him. No one wants to walk to school with him. Even though they all live in the same dorm, they leave without him every day before he gets up. He doesn't ask them why. Presumably it's because they don't want to be near him. Fair enough, he thinks.

School is pretty easy. He doesn't need to be awake or not-sick. He drifts through the weeks, zoning out or sleeping through class mostly.

Tartarus is... not easy, but it's not difficult, either. He doesn't have to think about anything. He just shuts his brain off and fights, settles into a rhythm with Fuuka blasting music straight into his skull, half-zones out, lost to an endless repeating train of _weak to fire, wind won't work, slash damage for that one_ , on and on and on. They climb dozens of floors and they're no closer to the top. He's pretty sure the tower is infinite; it'll just keep going and going and going and Mitsuru will never let him stop climbing it. He's pretty sure his life is a nightmare he hasn't woken up from yet. Nobody else seems bothered. It's probably nothing he should be bothered by, either.

The most difficult thing about Tartarus, really, is that it's tiring. It drains him of all his energy and then he keeps going and it drains away more. He doesn't skip school, though. He crawls out of bed and pinches himself to keep awake through classes. Not that he gets much out of them anyway. Voices blur together. Time passes. He coughs into his sleeve and shuffles to the nurse's office. That's where you're supposed to go if you're sick, he's told.

Mr. Edogawa gives him some kind of "concoction"; Makoto takes it and drinks it, not really listening to him through the haze of exhaustion. Edogawa's the school nurse; it's medicine, presumably.

...He gags. It's _awful_ and it's _definitely not medicine._ It's some kind of... witch's brew. Edogawa tells him he's impressed that he survived. Makoto gazes blankly at him. He feels like crap. He feels maybe worse than he did before.

So that's not great. The next time Makoto goes back, he's sort of hoping that Edogawa will be gone, since there's no way _he's_ the real school nurse, but... all he gets is more weird poison. Nobody else is bothered. It's probably nothing he should be bothered by, either...?

After school, at least once a week, Makoto dawdles in the police station carefully inspecting piles of weapons. They all have to be something he wouldn't mind using, so he has to choose carefully. It sucks, but everyone's counting on him to make the right choices, so he usually takes his time. Adachi's always there. They talk. Makoto figures he might as well.

Adachi's friendlier than the other people in the mall. The cashiers at the pharmacy barely even look at him. One time he went in and asked how many sleeping pills he'd need to take at once to put himself in a coma and the cashier just shrugged and said _I'm not a doctor, sir._ Which... fair enough, he wasn't a doctor, but it still seems to Makoto like that's not quite the appropriate reaction. Apparently it's fine.

Sometimes every hour feels like the Dark Hour; like he's the only real person in the world. He feels out of sync with everything around him. Maybe they're not perceiving the same reality, he thinks dully. Maybe the reason everything seems fucked up to him but not everybody else is because he's actually just hearing and seeing and thinking wrong all the time. He _is_ crazy.

 

"You ever use any of these things?" Makoto asks, drawing the string back on a bow to feel how it bends. Adachi is clipping coupons today. He does that a lot; he collects them, he says. Adachi looks up at him with a bemused half-smile, hands stilling for a moment.

"Hell no," he says. "What would I use them _for?_ "

Makoto shrugs. "Murder, I guess." He narrows his eyes at the runes carved into the bow's handle. They don't seem especially helpful. He puts the bow down and turns his attention to the swords. Yukari's fine for now.

"If I was gonna murder someone, I wouldn't do it with any of this crap," Adachi says, rather dismissively, attention still focused on his coupons. "That'd be stupid. 'Someone's been cut in half with a magic sword, who could the culprit be? Surely not that guy with all the magic swords...'"

Fair enough. Makoto sets aside a new sword for himself, then double-checks how much money he has. More than enough, as usual. Something for Akihiko would be good, he thinks vaguely. "How would you do it, then?" he asks. "If you were gonna murder someone."

Adachi pauses for a second and his eyes flick up to Makoto. His mouth tugs into an unpleasant lopsided grin and his voice gets noticeably deeper. In a drawl that sets Makoto's teeth on edge, Adachi asks, "How do you know I haven't already?"

Makoto looks at him, dull and expressionless as ever. He wonders if he should be scared of him. He wonders if Adachi is trying to scare him, and if so what difference that should make.  He wonders if it's working. He can't really tell any more. Unless it's the sharp panic he gets in the most dire situations in Tartarus, everything's a little too far away to feel urgent.

"I don't," he says. His eyes flick away. He asks the obvious follow-up: "Have you?"

Adachi's face smooths back into a bland friendly smile, like that sharper grin was never there. His voice slips easily back into its usual pitch. He laughs-- he has this strange breathy little chuckle that's the auditory equivalent of drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth-- and shakes his head. "C'mon, now, why do you look so _serious?_ Of course I haven't! Just how little faith do you have in the police...? Being a cop's not like it is on TV, you know! Even in a place like this."

Makoto buys some weapons. He thinks for a long moment about whether or not he really thinks Adachi would kill someone. It's a little unsettling that he honestly can't decide. Adachi doesn't actually seem dangerous. He hasn't done anything. There's just something off about him. He _feels_ dangerous, for reasons he can't pin down.

"Have a good one. Stay safe out there," Adachi calls to him as he heads out. Makoto lifts his hand in a lazy dismissive gesture and slouches away.


	6. Chapter 6

They watch him while he sleeps, but nobody ever mentions the boy. The contract boy. Pharos. The Death Arcana. Igor and Elizabeth don't seem to have anything to say about any of his Social Links, including that one. He considers asking them if Pharos is real, but he suspects they would tell him something cryptic and mystical. If it gives him Social Link power, he supposes, it's probably fine, even if it's a hallucination. Even if Pharos does feel evil and send unpleasant cold shivers up his spine. Even if Pharos's creepy lilting voice haunts his nightmares. Even if it does seem like _maybe_ waking up in the middle of the night with his vision swimming and a teleporting hallucination child climbing on top of him in bed whispering about the moon is _maybe_ a crazy-person thing. It's probably fine.

There are a lot of things he has to decide are fine.

Like how every time he goes to the mall, Adachi is _there._ Even when he's not working. He's _right there._ Makoto stops by the pharmacy to grab some supplies before going to sew with Bebe and Adachi is there, squinting at shampoo. He takes the train across town and Adachi is in another car reading a book. He goes to Wild Duck Burger and Adachi's just heading out, talking on his phone with a soda in his hand. Little things like that. Most of the time Adachi doesn't even seem to notice him or acknowledge his presence in any way. Sometimes he'll give Makoto a glance and a nod. He never looks caught or guilty or like anything at all strange is going on.

Makoto can't tell if he's hallucinating, paranoid, or if Adachi is stalking him. He's not sure which one is the least unreasonable. Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe it's just a small city, and Adachi _happens_ to be in the same place at the same time as him... all the time.

 

Makoto keeps his eyes on the armor, picking up and putting down the same three pieces over and over again. Adachi is pretending to read a book-- _Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage_ , and Makoto doesn't know enough about books or French to know how uncomfortable he ought to be (very)-- while actually staring at him. Makoto can feel his eyes on his skin, an uncomfortable strange prickle. He very deliberately does not look back at him. He mulls over what to say, indecision weighing down on his tongue. Adachi is content not to talk. He lets the silence stretch out. It feels deliberate; every second of silence is part of some carefully-calculated plan to fuck with his head.

But that's crazy. That's something a crazy person would think. Is it?

Makoto puts his hands in his pockets and looks back at Adachi, finally. "Have you been following me?" he asks.

Adachi's smile is bland and ever so slightly sharp. "Who, me?" He shuts his book on his index finger, keeping his page marked, and leans forward. "Where'd you get an idea like that?"

Makoto gazes dully back at Adachi. "From you following me," he says bluntly.

"I think you might be paranoid, Yuki-kun," Adachi says; his voice is breathy and lilting and just shy of singsong, and he drags out Makoto's name in a grating mockery of affection.

Makoto isn't sure what to say to that. Adachi's so blatantly making fun of him, but it's not like he's actually said or done anything Makoto could tell anyone about. This was intentional, of course. It must have been. Or was it? Maybe he _is_ paranoid. It's not like it would be the first entire person he hallucinated. Would it? Pharos feels real, too.

Thinking about this gets him nowhere. Makoto shifts his weight, keeping his hands in his pockets, and presses, " _Why_ have you been following me?"

Adachi props up his chin on his hands, still smiling broadly. "You'd be a terrible cop. You're no good at interrogations. You'll never get anything out of me that way. If I had been following you, would I really admit it so easily? Of course I haven't been doing something like that." He lowers his eyelashes and lolls his head to the side. "That would be _creepy_."

It's satisfying, getting Adachi to do something sharp and unsettling. He's a predator-- a crocodile sitting in the shallow water with his mouth open waiting for someone to get too close-- and sometimes it seems like only Makoto can tell. Sometimes it feels like he might have imagined it, but when Adachi smiles at him like that and discomfort curls around his throat he knows he isn't imagining it. It's like they're the only two actually clued in to reality. That's terrifying and creepy, but it still has a sort of allure to it. Not a lot of things feel certain or real, but that nasty crooked smirk-- that little glint in his eye-- sometimes is exactly what he needs.

"You're creepy," Makoto says flatly.

Adachi rocks back in his seat, laughing sheepishly. "Whaaaat? Geez, you're so harsh, Yuki-kun! You're gonna hurt my feelings... I mean, kids your age ought to learn to respect your elders!"

"Whatever, " he mutters. He reaches up to clip his headphones back over his ears. "Stop stalking me and do your job."

Adachi settles comfortably back into his chair and opens his book again. "I told you, didn't I? I have to keep tabs on you. You're a menace," he says airily. He flips the page and makes a faint amused noise. "Besides, it's not like anyone else is keeping an eye on you. You should be grateful."

"So you admit it," Makoto says. Adachi just shrugs all loose and casual, then lifts one hand and makes a lazy little shooing motion. Makoto would scowl, if he had the energy. He doesn't. He turns up his music, sticks his hands in his pockets again, and slouches away.

It's probably fine.


	7. Chapter 7

Makoto walks into the mall; it's late, and his hands are in his pockets, and he doesn't know what day it is. He's not sure he knows what _month_ it is. He meanders over to Tanaka, because he's here and he'll talk to him (probably) and if he doesn't find something to do they'll make him go to Tartarus. He doesn't want to go to Tartarus.

Makoto unclips his headphones from his ears, lets them drop around his neck. "Hey," he says to Tanaka, sticking his hands back into his pockets. He gazes dully at Tanaka's shoulder. "...wanna 'mold my young mind' or whatever?"

Tanaka huffs out a breath and says, "My schedule is so packed I don't even have time to breathe. I don't usually deal with your average Joe, you know." He leers down at Makoto and wags his finger at him. "You should be glad that you're such a handsome boy."

Makoto says nothing. He usually doesn't. It's nice to just have someone talking at him. It doesn't last long, though. Tanaka opens his mouth to launch into something, then freezes, mouth twitching into an awkward uncomfortable smile, eyes fixed on something right behind Makoto.

For a moment, Makoto wonders if he's seen a Shadow, if it's the Dark Hour already and he just didn't notice, but then Adachi comes up right behind him and puts both of his hands on his shoulders, pressing down and leaning over him slightly. Giving Tanaka a bland friendly smile, he says, "Oh, I dunno about that, Tanaka-san... pretty boys like him have it kinda rough, especially around here! This kind of face tends to attract shady characters."

"O-officer Adachi!" Tanaka says, visibly sweating. The smile pulling at his mouth looks somehow even more uncomfortable. "H-heh heh... uh... I imagine it would..."

Adachi pulls Makoto back a step, so close Makoto can feel his body heat. They're not quite touching. It's not quite a hug. It's close enough to one that it's weird, though. "Say, Tanaka-san... I've heard some funny rumors about you around the station lately! Something about false advertising...? It sounded pretty serious, but here you are! Hahaha, I guess that kinda thing isn't so bad when you're a big name like you, right?" He grins, goofy and lopsided, and Tanaka pales.

"Around the station?" he echoes faintly.

"Oh, geez, maybe I wasn't supposed to let that slip... I thought you knew already! Wuh-oh... me and my big mouth..." Adachi screws up his face and glances up at the ceiling with a pleading miserable look. "I'm gonna get in trouble now... I-I mean, hahaha, just idle gossip! It probably doesn't mean anything! I'm probably misremembering it or something, too... just pretend I didn't say anything! ...Seriously, _please_ pretend I didn't say anything..."

The faux-innocence makes Makoto grind his teeth, but neither Adachi nor Tanaka seem to notice. Tanaka says, "Of course, of course," vaguely and hurries off with his phone out without even a tootaloo.

Makoto steps forward and turns to face Adachi properly, rolling his shoulders back. Adachi sighs, looking vaguely disgusted at Tanaka's retreating back, rubbing his neck. "...ugh, that kind of guy really gets on my nerves. You okay?"

One has to wonder, Makoto thinks, what _kind of guy_ Adachi is talking about. Adult men who weirdly spend all their time with teenagers? Gay people? Businessmen?

The ambiguity of it is the point, he thinks; it's just appropriate enough that it doesn't stand out, but bland enough that he can project whatever meaning suits him onto it. Adachi can look like he's having a conversation even though Makoto is doing all the work. This way _he_ doesn't have to really say anything and risk being offensive; it's up to Makoto to decide what they're gonna talk about.

It's clever. Adachi's good at this. Makoto nods to indicate that he is indeed okay, then says, "...He's my friend."

Adachi's eyes flick to Makoto and his face shifts into something deeply unimpressed and almost genuine. "...ehh? Friend? _That guy?_ C'mon, Yuki, you gotta be kidding. Don't think I didn't notice him taking your money... isn't he just a lecherous old con?"

Makoto shrugs. "Yeah," he says. "So?"

Adachi looks baffled. He plants a hand on his hip and gestures. " _So,_ that's not friendship! What's _wrong_ with you? Does he even know your name?"

Makoto doesn't see what that has to do with anything. Lots of his friends don't know his name. "It was only 40,000 yen. If it doesn't bother me, what's the problem...?"

"The problem is that it doesn't bother you..." Adachi groans, dragging his hand down his face. "Don't you have any self-preservation instincts??"

He shrugs. "It's not like I don't know he has ulterior motives..." he mutters, glancing away. If he had facial expressions, he'd look sullen. He always looks sullen, so it doesn't make much of a difference. "He likes me and wants to spend time with me and talk about work. It's fun for him. What's wrong with that?"

Adachi looks even more annoyed and baffled, much to Makoto's amusement. He's actually bothered? It's not _concern;_ the flimsy concerned façade is being eaten away rapidly by genuine aggravation. "Seriously...? What's with that line of thinking... what if he steals your organs in an alleyway or something?"

That gets some careful consideration. What if? Is that a real concern? Maybe. Tanaka is very shady. It seems a little far-fetched, though. Besides, even if it did happen... that'd be fine. Either he'd be dead, which wouldn't be so bad, or he'd be alive, so it's fine. He shrugs. Adachi clicks his tongue and shakes his head and makes a shooing motion. "Alright, whatever, you gotta go on home now." He is not, Makoto notices, wearing his badge or his gun. Off the clock.

"I don't want to go home." Makoto looks down at the floor and taps his toe against the scuffed-up floor. "Are you free?"

"Ehhh? Aw, c'mon, kid, now you're _my_ problem just cuz I helped you out a little?" Adachi makes a face. "Don't you think I have better things to do with my evening than babysit a depressing high schooler?"

"You busted my plans for the evening. You owe me new ones," Makoto says. He shifts his weight, fidgeting with a coin in his pocket. Anxiety starts bubbling up through his usual numb haze. Maybe he can do karaoke by himself again. Pretend he couldn't hear his phone. "You're not busy."

"I could be! Maybe I have a date!" Adachi says. His aggravation isn't real any more. It's got a different pitch. A different meter. Makoto looks up at him again and arches one eyebrow. He doesn't need to say anything. They both know Adachi doesn't have a date. Adachi sighs loudly and rubs the back of his head. "Ugh... fine... you can come hang out at my place. I just came by to grab something at the pharmacy, gimme a sec..."

Makoto waits patiently in the mall, staring at the fountain, and it feels like about two seconds before Adachi's back with a small bag. "...so you really waited..." he mutters. "Alright. Follow me."

 

The drive to Adachi's place is too quiet. Makoto stares out the window without seeing much of anything, thinking about the shriek of metal and the sensation of flames licking at his skin. Adachi doesn't talk, so the silence is deafening and horrible. It's up to him to say something, he thinks, but he can't think of what. He can feel Adachi watching him out of the corner of his eye, but he doesn't really know _why_ or what he's looking for.

It's Adachi who breaks the silence. "Can't you just hang out with your monster-fighting buddies at your dorm? Why do you wanna avoid them?"

Makoto keeps his face pressed against the cold car window. "They think if we're spending time together at night, we should do it at Tartarus," he mumbles. He blinks as the lights start blurring together. "...Akihiko and Junpei never want to hang out even at school."

Adachi drums his fingers on his steering wheel. "Sounds like they don't like you very much. Are they 'friends' too?" Makoto nods a little. "Yuki, I don't think you know what friendship is."

He's pretty sure he knows. Igor and Elizabeth know, anyway. They're magic. They know what they're talking about. Makoto has never really had friends before, but people who want to talk to him seems like a fine definition.

Adachi parks and gets out of the car and Makoto follows him into his apartment, hands firmly in his pockets. "Hey, don't draw too much attention to yourself, alright? I don't want my neighbors spreading any weird rumors about me," Adachi says as they walk to his front door. He fishes in his pocket for his keys and Makoto looks around. There's no one around... it's quiet.

Adachi's apartment is the same as it was before. Small. Empty. Clean. He has a bedroom, a tiny bathroom, and a living room with a small kitchen. It's a nice place. Not stellar by any measure, but it's got more than one room. That seems good to Makoto. The walls are bare and off-white and a little busted. Adachi has no decorations and not much clutter. A lot of books, somewhat haphazardly shoved onto his bookshelves, but that's about it. No photos, no posters, no knickknacks or garbage or piles of things on the floor.

Adachi sets his bag from the convenience store down on his low table, then glances back at Makoto. "You want something to eat? You hungry?"

Makoto slouches in and stands near the couch, shuffling his feet. "Yeah. I'm a bottomless pit."

"Here. Go nuts." Adachi throws a box of off-brand Poptarts at his face. Makoto catches it; it's unopened. Strawberry flavor. They look kind of gross, but... whatever. He opens the box, sits on the couch, and takes out a pastry.

It tastes about as bland and nasty as he expected. He keeps eating it, watching Adachi putter around his house. Adachi takes off his jacket and tie and rolls up his sleeves, and Makoto watches him with disproportionately keen interest. He's just... normal. He is definitely a messed-up guy, but he's functional. Watching him move around his apartment-- putting things away, making coffee in his kitchen-- is alien and fascinating.

"So... your friends hate you, you don't have any food, and you're miserable all the time. You spend a lot of time lurking in a crappy shopping mall at night hanging out with sketchy old dudes. Seems like you'd _want_ to spend all your time in the spooky magic tower," Adachi says conversationally. "Not a fan of playing hero?"

Adachi wants to talk about him. Makoto doesn't like talking about himself. He shoves three-quarters of a Poptart into his mouth and chews while he ponders what to say. After a pause, he blinks slowly and tosses a bit of hair out of his face and says, "Tartarus makes me tired and sick. It sucks. It's cold and weird." He fidgets with another pastry. "It doesn't help anyone."

"Huh," Adachi says. He sips his coffee. "So you just avoid them? Can't you just refuse to go at all? There's a bunch of them. They'd be fine without you."

Makoto drops his gaze to his not-Poptart. "...I dunno," he says. "I'm the leader. They can't go without me."

Adachi exhales an amused breath. " _Can't_ or won't?"

"...won't," Makoto mumbles. He shoves another not-Poptart into his mouth, skin prickling with discomfort. Adachi is looking at him and forcing him to talk about himself and it's _weird._

"Sucks for you," Adachi says mildly, and sips his coffee again. Makoto isn't sure what to do with that; Adachi obviously doesn't particularly _care,_ so it's not like he should tell him not to worry. He's very matter-of-fact.

Adachi rubs his neck with his free hand, leaning more heavily against the wall, eyes drifting away. "I should probably report your whole situation to social services or something... do you have a case worker?" Makoto shrugs. "...Is _anyone_ keeping tabs on you besides me?" He shrugs again. "Who's your legal guardian?" Another shrug. Adachi sighs and closes his eyes. "You should know this stuff..."

Makoto picks at his pastry and says nothing. Adachi shakes his head. "Honestly... what kind of a position do you think you're putting me in? I'm only twenty-four, I can't be responsible for a kid your age... or any kids..." he grumbles. He looks at Makoto, then rubs his face and groans a little. "I guess you can bug me if you need someplace to stay... I've got a couch... but don't get too clingy, alright?"

It's difficult to tell what Adachi's ulterior motives might be. Makoto knows they're there, but... it's hard to say. That's unsettling, more than how fake he is: not knowing what he wants. He picks off a bit of pastry with his fingernails and eats it, then nods. For now, this is fine.

Adachi sits down on the couch with his coffee and a book and starts reading, apparently content to let Makoto just sit there getting crumbs on the couch in silence. It's weird. Makoto's gaze drifts to the pharmacy bag on the table and fixes on it. After a few long moments of staring, Adachi follows his gaze and says, "Resisting the temptation to snoop?"

"What'd you get?" Makoto asks. He fidgets. "Are you sick?"

"Nah," Adachi says. His eyes flick to Makoto and his mouth curves into a small smile before he drops his attention back to his book. "Ketamine and aripiprazole."

Makoto takes another bite of his pastry, chews and swallows, then says, "What're those?"

"Illegal," Adachi says without looking up. "So keep it to yourself, alright?"

"What are they _for?_ "

"None of your business."

How suspicious... it seems like he's going to have to figure it out on his own. He makes a vague mental note of the names (apri... pi... something...) to look up online when he gets home. They talk for a while about nothing in particular... then Makoto falls asleep on the couch.


	8. Chapter 8

Makoto wakes up and panics for a second because he has no fucking idea where he is. He jolts awake and scrambles upright, wheezing a little. Adachi is awake already, in the kitchen making something that smells delicious. Well, it smells like food-- that's close enough. "Morning."

He checks himself over-- clothes on, wallet unstolen-- before mumbling a barely-audible response. Makoto is deeply disoriented. He never sleeps at other people's houses. He never eats breakfast. He never sleeps through the Dark Hour. Usually something wakes him up-- SEES, Shadows, Pharos, a sense of impending doom--but not this time.

"You can use my shower," Adachi says. His toaster makes a startlingly loud noise as it finishes toasting something or other. It smells slightly burnt. Makoto flinches; Adachi does not. He glances over his shoulder as he gingerly removes two charred bits of bread from his toaster, eyeing Makoto appraisingly. "No time to wash your clothes. Next time, bring pajamas or something."

Makoto shrugs. His mouth feels dry. He's not prepared to have a conversation like this. It's never happened before. He reaches up to comb his hair with his fingers; it's tangled and slightly greasy, which is an unpleasant combination. When was the last time he washed it...? He's not sure. It has been a while. Maybe a few days? Maybe a week or two? "Whatever," he adds. His voice is hoarse and strange even tohis own ears.

Adachi loudly applies butter to his toast, then loudly scrapes at a pan with a spatula. Breakfast is apparently a very noisy meal. Makoto rubs his ears, then stands up and tucks his hands into his pockets. "You want some coffee?" Adachi offers mildly. "Food?"

Makoto nods. He eats the rest of the box of pastries, two pieces of toast, some eggs, and a banana; Adachi makes an amused noise and says, "Wow." He's still hungry, after that, but he has to get going or he'll be late for school. He downs a cup of coffee, mumbles thanks for the meal, and heads out.

Navigating to school from Adachi's apartment is disorienting; more so than he anticipated. Makoto has a routine. The places he goes and the routes he takes are always the same, and he never deviates. He clips his headphones to his ears and wanders vaguely in a direction that seems about right.  

He is late for school, for the first time ever, but he gets there. Ms. Toriumi gives him a look he can't figure out. It's somewhere between irritation and concern, which is something he gets a lot. She doesn't comment or ask him any questions.

At lunch, Junpei asks him if he spent the night with a girl (punctuated, naturally, with an overeager grin and an exaggerated wink). Yukari elbows him hard in the ribs and scoffs, "Don't be gross!"

Makoto picks at the food he got from the school store and says, dully, "It was a guy, actually." The food isn't very good. He wonders idly if he should've asked Adachi to make him a lunch. Maybe next time. Who knows, maybe he'd do it.

"Whaaaaaaaaat?! You're joking, right??" Junpei yells. Yukari elbows him again with a furious look. "Oof!! Yuka-tan, this is important!! Like, a _dude?_ For _real?_ What-- _who?_ How's that even _work??_ "

"It's none of your business, Stupei!! Look, you're making him uncomfortable!" Yukari says, gesturing at Makoto. Makoto's facial expression is dull and empty as it always is. He is not particularly uncomfortable. This is funny.

"I'm making _him_ uncomfortable?! What about _my_ comfort, huh??"

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?!"

"If he's a-- _you know_ \--"

"A _what?_ "

" _You know!!!_ "

Makoto nods sagely and doesn't chime in to say anything one way or another.

 

After school, he changes into something other than his school uniform. It's nice to be in clean clothes. Sleeping in his clothes always feels kind of gross. He does it all the time, but it doesn't feel good. He pulls on his one t-shirt and sits down on his desk chair in his room, one knee pulled up to his chest so he can rest his face on it. The texture of his jeans feels weirdly harsh; his skin feels too sensitive and everything he touches is too coarse, too dry, too _something._

Ketamine seems easier to spell. For a moment Makoto hesitates, wondering if this is an invasion of privacy. Maybe Adachi has some kind of weird health problem he doesn't want anyone to know about? But he didn't take any of the drugs he got. He just had them. It's weird. Even if it is an invasion of privacy, Makoto concludes, it doesn't matter that much. He Googles it, grimacing at the noise his keyboard makes when he types. That sounds too loud. Everything seems _off._

He goes still, gazing blankly at his computer screen. An uncomfortable cold feeling crawls up his spine. The visceral discomfort is so intense he actually shudders a little bit and presses his fingernails into the skin at the nape of his neck to try and ward it off.

It's a date rape drug. Of course it is; what else could it possibly have been? A significant chunk of the discomfort prickling at his skin is a peculiar sort of humiliation. He should have known. It's stupid that he's surprised or shocked or whatever this feeling is. Did he really expect anything different?

Makoto keeps his fingernails pressed into his neck. It doesn't really feel like anything, so he digs in his nails until he feels something; small sharp pinpoints of pain. Aripi-whatever next. Not quite helpful, but better than nothing. He spells the drug name wrong when he types it with one hand, but the internet knows what he means anyway.

This one is an antipsychotic. Makoto furrows his brow, shifting closer to the screen and staring intently at the pages of text. This sort of thing tends to blur together if he reads it on the computer, but he does his best. Lists of side effects and functions and chemical compounds and symptoms it treats. It doesn't really make sense. It seems like a strange thing to buy illegally. What's he doing with it?

Makoto sits back in his chair and gazes dully at the pile of weapons he keeps on his floor. He doesn't need any new stuff yet. They're doing fine. If he goes to talk to Adachi, it'll just be because he wants to go and talk to Adachi. No pretense of business. This seems dimly dangerous, but there isn't any better way to find out what Adachi is up to than asking him. It's not like anyone else would know.

It takes some time to get up out of his chair and then more time to get downstairs. He clips his headphones on over his ears so no one bothers him. No one bothers him.

The mall is strangely barren, as usual. Makoto glances around, then walks briskly over to the police station. He stops abruptly in the doorway. There is another officer working at the front desk. Someone he doesn't know. The cop looks up at him, folding his newspaper. "Hello, son. Everything alright?"

Makoto freezes up. He stands there in silence for a long moment, hands in his pockets, then turns and walks out. Adachi's not there. Where is he? What day is it? If Adachi isn't working at the mall, then where is he? Does Adachi go other places? Makoto feels a little dizzy. He exits the mall, then stands outside the front door staring at his feet for a while. He should probably go and find him. Maybe he's out arresting somebody. Cops do that sometimes.

He turns up the volume on his MP3 player and stares dully up at the sky. Is this important? Now that some time has passed, he's lost the brief spike of intense emotion. It seemed important earlier, but that was probably just him being weird. Makoto takes a moment to consider if he is, in fact, worried; he decides that he isn't, but he is curious.

After a moment (several minutes, in actuality, but he can't tell) of thinking, he decides to go wander around and see if he runs into Adachi anywhere. If not, he'll just talk to someone else who seems interesting. There are plenty of shady alleyways to wander down. That seems like a good place to start looking. Maybe Adachi's off doing a drug deal. Or stopping a drug deal. You never know.

The bulk of Iwatodai is a shady part of town. There are very few non-shady parts of town. Everywhere you go there are flyers for at least two different cults, victims of Apathy Syndrome on the ground and slumped against walls, and sullen-looking delinquents lurking in narrow ominous alleyways. It feels desolate, even when there's people around. Makoto likes it. It gives him the same sense of odd creeped-out comfort that the Velvet Room does; empty and ominous but very much _his_.

There aren't many people out in the city who seem particularly interesting or many people who aren't already talking to somebody. Makoto shuffles up to a few clusters of people and learns a bit about the economy (it's bad), factory work (there isn't any any more), and a new cult he hadn't heard about before (something about a sun god). No one wants to talk to him _that_ much, though, so he keeps moving along, shuffling down any particularly promising-looking nasty alleyways just in case he runs into Adachi in one of them.

Funnily enough, he does. Sort of.

Makoto shuffles down an alleyway and takes a turn and finds Adachi, along with three other extremely strange-looking people. Some kind of goth-loli redhead girl, a dude with truly atrocious hair wearing what looks like a lime green straightjacket, and a scrawny shirtless dude who has a gun tucked into his belt. Not an Evoker; a revolver. They look like criminals, maybe; they also look sort of like dweeby cosplayers. The gun looks real, but Makoto supposes it could be a prop. Adachi doesn't look like he's being mugged. They seem to be having some kind of conversation that Makoto can't hear over his music, so Makoto takes off his headphones and lets them drop around his neck.

The goth girl is slumped against a doorway, clawing at her arm and mumbling to herself. The straightjacket guy is texting. The gun guy stops mid-sentence to eye Makoto up, smiling sharply. "Ah... fancy seeing you here," he says, like he knows him. There's something unsettling and familiar about the weird lilt in his voice. Airy and insincere and dangerous. Like Adachi.

"Eh? Yuki-kun?" Adachi adopts a carefully-arranged look of surprise. Makoto wonders dimly why he bothers making faces when they both know it's fake, then remembers he's never actually _told_ Adachi he can tell that his facial expressions are fake. "What're you doing here...?"

"Looking for you," Makoto says. He doesn't elaborate. He nods at Adachi's gang of weirdos. The sharply smiling man doesn't pull out his gun. That seems like a good sign. "What're you doing?"

Adachi raises his eyebrows and rubs his neck; his next facial expression is a little more sincere. Exasperated, skeptical, maybe a little bit fond. No, Makoto decides immediately, _fond_ isn't quite right. It's some kind of equivalent, though. "Looking for me... in a dark alleyway, super far away from everywhere you usually hang out?" Adachi asks.

"It worked." Makoto stands there with his hands in his pockets. He doesn't have much to say. It'd be weird to ask Adachi about the drugs in front of these random people he's never spoken to before. He could ask about the people, but that's the sort of thing that Adachi will either explain imminently or never.

"Ha ha ha, I guess so..." Adachi combs his hand through his hair, then sighs and makes a little shooing motion at the gun dude. "Alright, skedaddle, I'd better get this kid home before he gets murdered."

"Time delivers us all to the same end," says the goth girl suddenly, staring right at Makoto. Makoto stares back. "Why suffer longer when you could surrender now and end your pain? All of existence is suffering. Free yourself from Samsara and embrace oblivion."

She seems like she might be in a cult. Makoto wonders which one. She reminds him a little of Pharos, which is neither a good nor a bad thing. "We'll see you again," says the sharply-smiling man. He glances at his two henchmen (they seem like henchmen) and nods at the far end of the alley and starts walking away. "Come along, you two."

Adachi walks over to Makoto, plants a hand on his back, and starts steering him back the way Makoto came. "Seriously, Yuki-kun, you've got a real bad habit of getting yourself into trouble. Don't just wander around dangerous parts of town like it's no big deal. Face like yours, you're asking to get--" He very obviously deliberately stops and feigns a flustered huffy exhale. "--well, you know."

Makoto keeps his hands in his pockets and walks just ahead of Adachi so Adachi's hand doesn't make contact with his back. "Why do you have those drugs?" he asks bluntly.

"What drugs?" Adachi and Makoto emerge onto the street. It's not that much less shady-looking than the alleyway. Adachi glances around, then starts steering Makoto down the sidewalk. Makoto behaves himself and walks where Adachi wants him to. Maybe he's getting kidnapped. Probably not.

This particular façade is perplexing to him; Adachi pretending he doesn't know what Makoto is talking about. Obviously he does. Is he trying to screw with him? Just being contrary? It seems like Adachi might be trying to bait him into arguing about whether or not the drugs were real to try and distract him from getting an answer to his actual question. Makoto decides to respond with dull silence so Adachi knows he won't engage with that sort of nonsense.

It doesn't work. Adachi responds to his silence with more silence, apparently content to just walk towards the monorail station in complete silence indefinitely. Makoto's discomfort slowly intensifies until he can't deal with it any more. "Ketamine is a date rape drug. Why do you have it?"

"Date rape," Adachi says, mild and amused and conversational.

Makoto gazes dully at him, expression (as ever) unchanged. He thinks if he could summon up a facial expression, now would be a good time to do that, but he isn't sure what facial expression matches up with the dread slowly twisting his stomach into a knot. "Are you joking?"

"That'd be a pretty fucked up thing to joke about, Yuki-kun," Adachi says.

"It's a fucked up thing to do," Makoto counters. Adachi just shrugs, lifting his hands, looking thoroughly unperturbed. "What's the other one for? Are you psychotic?"

"Nah. It's for guests. I know a kid. Gets all his meds from those guys," He jabs his thumb over his shoulder, then smiles wryly. "As you probably gathered, they're not the most reliable folks. I'm his backup."

That sounds true, but why would it be? Why would Adachi help anyone? Why does he help Makoto? Makoto can't really tell why Adachi does anything. Just for the sake of it? Some kind of scheme? "Are you lying?"

Adachi laughs airily. "Of course not. Why would I be? You're so paranoid, Yuki-kun. His name's Aragaki. Haven't you met? He's a buddy of Sanada's."

Makoto blinks slowly. "Oh. Okay," he says. He lifts his hands to his headphones and holds them as he walks, not sure if he wants to put them on or not. He feels uncomfortably vulnerable without them on, but would feel uncomfortably vulnerable with them on as well. Adachi makes a soft amused breathy noise that isn't quite a laugh but is something close enough. Makoto really hates it.

"So, what, you missed me? Were you really out scouring the streets looking for me? I thought you wanted to get rid of me," Adachi says cheerfully, leaning over slightly to peer at Makoto's face. "You falling for me, Makoto?"

"Yeah," Makoto says dully. He tucks his hands back in his pockets. "Head over heels."

Adachi actually laughs that time. "You really should get better at injecting some tone into your voice sometime, Yuki-kun," he says casually, tilting his head to one side and rubbing his shoulder. "Saying that kind of stuff can be dangerous, you know?"

Makoto gives Adachi a flat look. "Is that a threat?"

Adachi just smiles his weird goofy but sharp-eyed smile, laughing lightly. "Hahaha, whaaat? That hurts my feelings, Yuki-kun... aren't I always helping you out? You could stand to be a little nicer to me."

Makoto shrugs. They walk in silence until Makoto can't deal with it any more. He doesn't really want to say anything else-- he used up all his talking energy for the next day or so-- but Adachi won't say anything to fill the silence. He rolls his shoulders back to try and shrug off the discomfort, then clips his headphones to his ears.

After a few seconds, Adachi loosely curls his fingers in the cord, then yanks, pulling both of Makoto's headphones off his ears. It's jarring. It doesn't _hurt_ , but the sensation of having his headphones yanked off feels sharp and alarming. Makoto's breath hitches and he freezes up. This isn't something he knows how to respond to. It's so much more invasive than anything else Adachi could possibly have done. The sudden shift in volume and loss of pressure on his ears is dizzying. "Don't be rude, Yuki-kun," Adachi says lightly, giving him a wide pleasant smile.

It takes Makoto several moments to settle back into his body, to remember how to breathe. It feels like minutes, but it can't be, because they've barely moved. It isn't a big deal, though. Why does it feel like a big deal? Makoto's fingernails are digging hard into his palms, and his shoulders are painfully tense, but why? This is fine. It _was_ rude. "Sorry," he mumbles.

When they reach the monorail station, Makoto decides promptly to go back to the dorm and close himself in his room and do nothing else for the rest of the day. As he speedwalks away, Adachi waves him off with a cheery, "See you around, Yuki-kun!"

It's just another way to say goodbye. He knows that. Still, his eyes flick around the mostly-empty station, the monorail car, the sidewalk, the street, and he doesn't stop checking over his shoulder to see if he's being followed until the door to his dorm is shut behind him.

Makoto leans heavily against the door. He feels unsteady. It's bizarre; he doesn't feel especially frightened, except in that he is experiencing all of the physical symptoms of a panic attack. His heart is pounding in his ears. He is pale and sweating and wide-eyed and trembling and he can't quite breathe right, but there's nothing in particular he's actually scared of. The physicality of his panic, counterintuitively, makes him feel even more disconnected from everything than he usually does. There doesn't feel like there's any reason for him to be reacting this way. He's _fine._

"Welcome back," Mitsuru says from the couch, glancing up from her book only briefly. "Will we be going out to Tartarus tonight?"

She doesn't notice. Maybe he isn't having a panic attack. Maybe he's imagining how bad this is. That would make more sense, since he doesn't feel panicked. He shakes his head at Mitsuru and makes a beeline for his room. No one asks him if he is okay.


	9. Chapter 9

August. It's still summer. Is it still summer? Makoto can't keep track of this shit. The track meet is an exhilerating high point in the middle of a blurry smear of _the full moon is soon, it's soon, it's coming._ Mamoru Hayase asks him on a date or something, which is a bit weird, but he shrugs it off because _the full moon is soon_ and that's all that matters now.

Yukari asks him if he's ready. He says, dull and expressionless as ever, "Not really."

He hopes, maybe, that she'll listen to him. She says, "Well, you don't seem nervous. By the way, if you wanna go to Tartarus, I'll come along."

He does not want to go to Tartarus. He goes to the mall instead. He plays the crane game until his hands cramp up and his eyes glaze over and he physically cannot continue playing the crane game, at which point he shuffles over to karaoke to do karaoke by himself for a few hours. This seems like a fine way to spend his time the night before a full moon. It's not like there's anything better for him to do.

 

It's cold underground. While the others talk amongst themselves and do their usual stuff-- Aigis and Fuuka and Mitsuru navigating up front, Yukari and Junpei bickering because Junpei's trying to be spooky and it's working a little bit-- Makoto stares vacantly at the dark greenish stone. There's not much to look at. Not much to think about. Akihiko is quiet, too, but Akihiko's quiet is an intense focus thing.

Makoto keeps his hands in his pockets and just walks, letting everything blur as they go. Everyone's voices fade to an incomprehensible murmur. They pass through a towering set of inches-thick metal doors that are thankfully open already, then stop.

From behind him comes a familiar sneering voice: "Well done..."

Makoto turns at the same time as everyone else, though in his vague haze it takes him a few seconds to process what's going on properly. His instinct when he hears the lilting sneering tone is that it must be Adachi, and when the person standing there is _very much not_ Adachi he shorts out for a second. It's two of those weirdos Adachi was hanging out with suspiciously in an alleyway that one time; the boys, not the goth. Since they're tangentially related to Adachi, that adds another dazed second of processing before Makoto finally verbally responds.

"Oh, it's you guys," he says.

The rest of SEES turn and look at him in alarm. "You know these guys?!" Yukari asks, baffled.

"Lucia didn't sense them at all until just now..." Fuuka says nervously, shifting back a few steps and staring at the two guys like she would especially threatening Shadows.

"My name is Takaya," says the shirtless one. "This is Jin. We are known to some as Strega. We haven't been introduced before, but we've been keeping an eye on you. All of you."

Makoto blinks slowly at the two of them. Takaya and Jin. It's hard to tell how old they are... Takaya looks weirdly old, but more because he looks like he's dying than anything else. The other two look younger. What kind of a name is Strega, anyway...? Does it stand for something? Maybe it's a reference he's not getting...

It's hard to stay focused when they're all just standing around talking. Makoto fixes his eyes on Takaya and half-listens to the rest of the conversation.

_What difference does it make? There will always be disasters, whether they are caused by Shadows or arise from human folly. No one can predict the future, anyway. But, that is all beside the point... surely you will acknowledge the sense of significance the Dark Hour has given you._

A sense of significance... that's interesting enough for him to remember. It's something to think about. He doesn't really care about their plan to stop them or whatever... that's irrelevant. They can do what they want. SEES will do what they want. There's more of SEES, and they're less homeless than these guys seem, and they're doing just fine so far, so... whatever.

But... a sense of significance. Is that what they're getting out of this? Is that something people _want?_ Makoto would do anything to feel less significant. He knows he's significant. They keep reminding him of how important he is, how they can't-- _won't--_ do it without him. It's horrible. There's nothing more stressful than knowing that he's significant. If he breaks, they have no fallback. If he can't do it, no one can. Nothing should rely on someone so unreliable.

Junpei's jealous that he's not the leader. People want to feel significant... that's weird. Something to keep in mind. He continues zoning out when Takaya and Jin lock them in and they have to trudge around looking for a magic tank.

They do their usual thing. It's still both easy and hard. It hurts. It's tiring. By the time it's over, he's thoroughly exhausted, like always. It's a numb kind of exhaustion. Everything is kind of numb, though. Even physical pain isn't sharp enough to cut through the haze inside his head-- not really. He gets burned, shot, run over, frozen, all kinds of things, and none of it really registers.

Makoto wonders if Strega gets tired during the Dark Hour too. Do they have someone like Mitsuru or Fuuka? Maybe the goth one. Maybe scanning and data-gathering Personas are a girl thing. That seems sort of stupid, but not any more stupid than summoning a magic pile of slime by pretending to shoot yourself in the head.

When they get back to the dorm, Makoto collapses into bed almost immediately and sleeps until morning. There's no school, so he could sleep late; he does not. He wakes up at the same time he always does, gets up and leaves the dorm and gets halfway to school before he remembers it's summer break and there's no school to go to. Is that what they call being an overachiever...? He ponders that while he finds something else to do.

Student council, track, photography, sewing with Bebe... all his friends outside of school... he can do all that and they still pull off the full moon fights every month. He must be fine. Better than fine; he's an overachiever. Internally, he might feel awful, but he clearly doesn't really feel _that_ awful. If he felt awful for real, he wouldn't be able to do all of that. The reason no one else thinks anything is wrong... is probably because nothing is wrong. He's just... trying to feel significant? That doesn't feel right, but it _seems_ right. It's dizzying.

It's not true that no one noticed. Adachi noticed. Somehow, thinking about that helps. He's drowning and _Adachi agrees with me_ is a bit of driftwood he can grab onto to pull himself above water for a bit. The tighter he clings to it the safer he feels; it's secure. Adachi thinks he's vulnerable and crazy and fragile and weird. It's a sociopath cop's job to know that kind of stuff. Makoto breathes, shaky and gasping, and holds on.

After a full moon, Pharos shows up. That's how it goes. He'll be in Makoto's room tonight again. That's the craziest thing about his life, and Adachi is the only person who has a good grasp on what fucked up stuff is real and what fucked up stuff is fake. If Igor and Elizabeth won't tell him if Pharos is real, maybe Adachi can. That would help, he thinks. He's not sure what he's actually hoping for or what he means by _help_.

It's not until he's at the monorail station that he pauses and considers that it's highly likely that Adachi is an oozing unconscious coffin-blob-person during the Dark Hour and therefore completely unable to say one way or the other if Pharos is real. Troublesome. It takes him a few minutes of standing there staring off into space to figure out that there's an easy solution to not knowing something about a person and it's asking the person about it. Right. Good strategy.

Makoto walks into the mall police station, hands in his pockets, and stares dully at Adachi over the counter. As he often is, Adachi is reading a book with his feet propped up on his desk, leaning back in his seat. _A Clockwork Orange_ today. "Are you awake during the Dark Hour."

"What, I don't even warrant a hello any more? Can't tell if I should be flattered or not..." Adachi says with a sigh. He closes his book and sets it down on his lap, smiling at Makoto with a weary indulgent fondness that might look friendly on another person but seems somehow dehumanizing on Adachi. Makoto continues staring blankly at him. Adachi ruffles his own hair and shrugs. "I mean, yeah. Sure I am, if I'm up late. Kind of a pain on night shifts, honestly... I'm working a whole extra hour and not getting paid for it..."

Makoto isn't sure if he's surprised or not. Probably not. Maybe he already knew this. It's hard to keep track of that kind of thing. He nods, to indicate that he heard and absorbed the information, then tilts his head to the side and lets his eyes slip to the posters on the wall behind Adachi. He's so tired. Thinking clearly is difficult... "Do you... have a Persona?"

"Who, me?" Adachi glances up at the ceiling with a look of exaggerated dopey thoughtfulness. "Mm... heck if I know. Like I'm gonna shoot myself in the head and find out? No way! You creepy emo teens might be all over that kind of stunt, but for a normal guy like me...?" He holds up his hands. "Uh-uh. Sorry, kid. No monster hunting for me. Can't imagine you'd ever want me on your team anyway... speaking of, how was your full moon last night?"

If he's awake during the Dark Hour, he has the potential to have a Persona... probably. He's pretty sure that's how this works. Makoto's eyes drift back to Adachi's bland smiling face. If you shoot someone else with an Evoker, does that summon their Persona...? It'd probably be bad to test that out on Adachi. Yukari would probably shoot Makoto if he asked her to. Someone in SEES would.

"Same as always..." he mumbles vaguely. "I'm tired..."

"Well, you're heaps of fun, as usual," Adachi says dryly.

If Adachi can be awake during the Dark Hour, then he could see Pharos. Or not see him, if Pharos isn't real. That would be useful. The thought of having to go home tonight and deal with Pharos on his own is suddenly, all at once, completely unbearable.

"...can I stay at your place tonight?" Makoto mumbles. Adachi makes a loud snorting noise, then coughs and presses his hand over his mouth, sliding his feet off the desk.

"Haha... you serious? Getting pretty bold, Yuki-kun..." Adachi raises his eyebrows and smiles all crooked and teasing. Makoto makes a face at him; Adachi laughs again and waves his hand dismissively. "Sure, sure. You can come over if you want. Couch is available as ever."

Makoto nods mutely. This is probably fine.


	10. Chapter 10

Adachi's apartment is still weirdly empty. It's strange, being somewhere he's been before that still isn't part of the routine. He knows this place, but he doesn't. Adachi sheds his jacket and shoes with practiced fluid ease; Makoto hangs back by the door staring vacantly at the apartment in general. Is there anything different about it this time...? He can't tell. It looks the same, he thinks. He slept through the care ride here, and he still feels like he might be asleep. Everything is slow and heavy.

"You want food?" Adachi asks. He pauses, tugging his tie loose, then exhales an amused breath. "What am I saying, of course you do... there's cup ramen and shit in here somewhere. Go nuts." He flaps his hand at the kitchen, then flicks his eyes over Makoto. "...you gonna die if you try and boil water, kiddo?"

Probably something about him standing motionless in the entryway staring off into space suggests that he isn't exactly up to multi-step tasks. Makoto takes off his shoes without taking his hands out of his pockets and mumbles, "Whatever." Boiling water doesn't seem dangerous, but it does seem like too much trouble. He makes a beeline for the couch, clipping his headphones to his ears.

"If you starve to death on my couch, I'm gonna get in trouble, you little twerp. Trying to frame me for child abuse or something?" Makoto doesn't look at Adachi; he looks up at the ceiling instead. It's smooth and featureless. There's a couple different shades of off-white on there, from where cracks have been repaired over the years; the ceiling looks like it should just be white, but the paler patches of new plaster make it look more aged than they would otherwise. Funny how that goes sometimes... the ceiling in the dorm is already a kind of beige-ish yellow. Maybe it'll show its age less because it's already an ugly yellowish color? "Pretty sneaky."

"I don't think I'm going to die of starvation," Makoto says.

"Hubris," Adachi says grimly, then audibly flicks on an electric kettle. Ah. He'll just make food for him after all. Makoto wonders if Adachi is secretly nicer than he lets on.

"Why make food for me?" Makoto asks. He turns his head to the side so he can watch Adachi's response. It's easier to gauge how fake he's being when Makoto can actually see his face. Adachi's voice doesn't have much range of expression; it's either just sarcasm or _gee-whiz-aw-shucks-who-me_. His face isn't that expressive either, granted, but it's a little more so.

Adachi pulls a beer out of his mostly-empty fridge and brushes the tip of his thumb against the edge of the little metal tab. He slouches against the fridge, looking back at Makoto. "Why not? It's the right thing to do, isn't it?" he says lightly. This doesn't sound any more or less sincere than anything else that comes out of Adachi's mouth.

"It's a pain," Makoto says dully. "Do you want to do the right thing?"

Seeing the expected second of delay before Adachi shifts his facial expression into a sheepish offended façade is satisfying. "Ehhh? What're you talking about? Everybody wants to do the right thing. Geez."

Makoto knows a conversational dead end when he sees one. He blinks slowly and mumbles, "Other people don't make food for me."

Adachi presses his thumb against the tab on his can, pausing as his mouth tugs into a crooked amused smile. "I guess I'm just better than everyone else you know."

That gives Makoto pause. It doesn't sound true. Adachi is incredibly creepy, and... and what? He hasn't done anything, actually. Has he? It's hard to think about it. The drugs-- but it's not like he's actually drugged him, or anyone Makoto knows about, or maybe anyone at all. Adachi doesn't seem to do much at all. Maybe he _is_ better than everyone else Makoto knows?

Makoto narrows his eyes a little. No, that definitely sounds like bullshit. He just can't figure out how to articulate, even internally, _why_ it's bullshit. Adachi sucks. He just... sucks less than other people...? No, that's not quite right.

Adachi finally actually applies pressure to the tab on his can and the sharp crack-hiss completely scatters the first coherent train of thought Makoto's had all day. He looks back up at the ceiling, then closes his eyes. He considers asking Adachi about Strega, but that doesn't seem like it would go anywhere. He's not sure what he would ask. _Are they dangerous?_ They don't seem dangerous. He's not worried. _What the hell kind of a name is 'Strega?'_ That doesn't seem important.

"Do you like feeling a sense of significance?" Makoto asks. He opens his eyes, but his vision is blurry and that makes him feel sort of sick so he closes them again. "Does helping me make you feel important...?"

That elicits a much longer than expected pause. Interesting. "Nah," is the eventual response. "That's a cute idea, though. Are all your conspiracy theories that romantic?"

Is that defensive sarcasm or just normal sarcasm? Makoto's not sure how to tell the difference. "I don't think so..."

"So I'm special?"

Makoto pauses, then just shrugs as best someone can shrug when they're on their back on a couch. It feels like more of an admission of guilt than it ought to; before he can shake it off, Adachi snickers at him and cements it.

Adachi makes him instant ramen and Makoto eats it quickly, and then Adachi retreats to his room to do whatever it is he does in his free time. Makoto must fall asleep, because the next thing he remembers is waking up.

Everything is stained with the Dark Hour's usual sickly green. It's uncomfortably silent. There is no hum from the fridge, no traffic outside, no shuffle of movement from elsewhere in the building. His MP3 player is silent.

"Hi, how are you?" Pharos says, fading into view about a foot away from the couch. He is, as he always is, smiling. The boy is small-- too small for his prison-pajamas-- and his bright blue eyes seem to glow faintly in the darkness. Makoto can never tell if they're actually glowing or if they're just so bright they seem like they are. He sits up quickly, breathing short, and his eyes flick towards the door to Adachi's room.

"Hm...?" Pharos follows his gaze, turning his head slowly and without otherwise moving his body, then turns his head to look around the apartment. "You're somewhere different today. Do you like it here?"

"...I guess," Makoto mumbles.

Pharos tilts his head slightly to the side. "Do you like it more than your room?" To that, Makoto just shrugs. "I see... well, I wanted to tell you that I remembered something else... The end won't be brought about by anyone in particular. It's coming because there are many people who wish it..."

The boy trails off, pausing, and his eyes drift to the door to Adachi's room again. "I wonder... what sort of person desires Death in that way? Inviting it into your home... isn't it strange? Living things should want to preserve life... shouldn't they? What do you think?"

Pharos asks this without looking away from the door to Adachi's room. Makoto isn't sure what he should be looking at. He isn't sure what to say, either. This seems heavy and important, but he just doesn't care. Who cares what people should or shouldn't want...?

The door to Adachi's bedroom opens, and Adachi steps out of his room, yawning and rubbing his neck. He's wearing a plain t-shirt and sweatpants and looks even more rumpled than he does during the day. Makoto's heart leaps into his throat. He's awake. He's here and he's awake and Makoto can find out if Pharos is real, finally.

Before either Pharos or Adachi can say anything, Makoto grips the arm of the couch and stares urgently at Adachi's face and asks, " _Can you see him?_ "

"That's right... we always hang out with just the two of us... well, I can see everything you can see," Pharos says helpfully. Makoto shoots Pharos a look, just for a second, then fixes his stare back on Adachi's face. This is important. He has to look at Adachi to gauge his reaction. More than ever, he needs to make absolutely certain he knows if Adachi is telling him the truth or not.

Expressionless, Adachi looks Makoto over, then Pharos. His brow creases slightly and his mouth twitches like he's actively fighting to keep some kind of facial expression off his face. Makoto can't tell what. Then Adachi looks back at Makoto, rubbing the side of his head sleepily, and says, "Sorry, what...? Can I see who, now?"

Makoto's heart drops. Adachi can't see him...? Pharos is standing right there, smiling up at Adachi. He's there. He looks real. Is this a joke? He tries to stare harder at Adachi's face, like that could reveal something else, but it doesn't give him any real insights. Adachi sleepily heads for the kitchen and gets a bottle of water out of the fridge. He says something else, but Makoto can't hear him over the ringing in his ears. He can vaguely make out that Adachi sounds sort of conversational and bland, like always, but with the added rasp of someone who's just woken up.

Adachi can't see Pharos... No one else can see or hear him...

That means Makoto must be crazy. It's a hallucination. Makoto sags on the couch. His body is too heavy to hold upright properly. Pharos looks at Adachi, then at Makoto, blinking slowly. "That's interesting."

Adachi leans against the fridge and unscrews the cap off the bottle of water. His mouth curves into a smile as he takes a drink from it, long fingers curled loosely around the plastic. Everything about this situation feels off. Adachi in pajamas is _weird._ Pharos being _here_ and not in the dorm is weird. Knowing that he's the only one who can see Pharos is weird. Makoto wonders if it's a bad kind of weird; it feels sort of like he's being strangled, but that's not that unusual. It's not good, but it... it's probably fine...

Like everything else, this is probably fine. He has an imaginary friend. He's sort of psychotic. That's... not that big of a deal. It hasn't been that big of a deal so far, but something about knowing that Pharos isn't real feels awful in a way that Makoto isn't used to. Pharos looks and feels and sounds real. How could he not be? How could Makoto really not be able to tell? If he can't tell that Pharos is fake, what else could he be imagining? Anything could be fake.

Adachi doesn't take his eyes off Makoto's face for a second. Is he concerned? Is that why he's looking at him like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass? That's probably nothing. Makoto's just projecting. Adachi's drinking water and looking at him with his eyes. He doesn't really have a facial expression at all; there's just something _off_ about how focused he is.

Makoto looks at Pharos instead, even though Pharos isn't real. Pharos smiles at him like nothing is different. He supposes nothing _is_ different. "Should I repeat the question?" Pharos asks pleasantly. "Or was it too scary to think about? I don't want you to be scared. We're friends, after all. I have something else to tell you."

That's too many things to respond to. Makoto swallows. Should he just ignore Pharos...? That seems rude. Maybe he should just keep acting the way he always did. "Tell me," he echoes dully.

"Soon, the poisonous flowers will bloom... one in your own garden, and three in the garden opposite yours. I don't know whether or not this has anything to do with the end, but you should be careful," Pharos says pleasantly. Makoto stares blankly at him. Pharos gazes back for a while, then says, "Did you know that some corpse flowers only bloom once every ten years...? I wonder if there was one blooming back then..."

Makoto has absolutely no idea how to respond to that, so he just doesn't. Pharos turns his head and stares off into the distance, then disappears and reappears and the end of the couch. "I'll come again if I find out anything useful. That's what friends are for, right?"

Then Pharos is gone. There is a long moment of agonizing silence, and then Makoto slowly turns his head and looks at Adachi. Adachi screws the cap back onto his water bottle. "You feeling okay?" Adachi asks. He holds out the water bottle. "I thought you might be talking in your sleep, but, uh, you look awake... as awake as you ever look, I mean. No offense!"

Makoto gives the water bottle a blank look, then shakes his head almost imperceptibly. He doesn't think that's quite the right response. "I guess I'm just crazy," he says.

Adachi glances up at the ceiling. "Well, uhh... I don't know if I'd say _crazy,_ " he says awkwardly. It's almost convincing. "You know... maybe you're just tired! Everybody sees weird stuff when they're tired. And... umm... talks to thin air and stuff!"

"Yeah," Makoto says. It would be hard to explain. He hesitates, then shakes his head again and decides to go back to sleep.

Makoto wakes up disoriented. He rolls off the couch, expecting to hit his head on the hardwood floor of his dorm room and instead hitting his head on the tatami floor of Adachi's apartment. It's less painful. The noise isn't as sharp. He lies there for a moment, letting his vision clear and focus. He's so tired.

"Morning, kiddo." Adachi is leaning casually against the wall, sipping a cup of coffee. How long has he been watching Makoto sleep...? He wonders vaguely why so many people do that. It seems weird, but it happens often enough that it must just be a normal thing he doesn't know about. Adachi's still in the clothes he slept in, looking only marginally less rumpled than he did during the Dark Hour.

Makoto nods at Adachi, then rubs at his face and looks out the window to get a look at the light. What time is it? It's morning. He has school. Right? No. It's hot. Summer. No school during the summer. Adachi is still looking at him. "You still hallucinating?" Adachi asks. It sounds sort of gentle, like Adachi thinks he's delicate, and Makoto can't tell if it's actually reassuring or not. Maybe. He could let it be reassuring. That sounds dangerous, though. He glances around the apartment to make sure that Pharos is actually gone, then shakes his head.

Adachi sips his coffee. "Does that sort of thing happen to you a lot?" Makoto shrugs. This apparently isn't the appropriate response, because Adachi wrinkles his eyebrows at him in an expectant sort of way and doesn't say anything else.

"Twice a month," he says eventually, fiddling with his headphones. "He visits before and after the full moon. Only during the Dark Hour."

Adachi tilts his head back to rest it against the wall, mulling that over. "Hallucinations on a schedule..." He smiles cheerfully and sips his coffee again. "Wow! Messed up! You're seriously like a character on a medical drama... maybe you have some obscure brain disease..."

Makoto shrugs.

Adachi lets him eat as much as he wants for breakfast, a choice he seems to regret once Makoto finishes eating an entire box of cereal and still isn't done yet. After he's eaten, Makoto heads back to the dorm. It's still early, it turns out, and most of the dorm isn't up yet, so no one's around to see him come home.


	11. Chapter 11

Apparently, dogs can have Personas. Makoto wonders dimly what Adachi would say about that. He doesn't go and ask.

The heat gets worse, and time smears into a blur again. It's too hot to think. Summer school is fine, he supposes; it's something to fill the time. He doesn't have to think to be able to do school, or listen to people, or fight his way up through Tartarus, or any of the other things he spends his time on. The summer heat can boil his brain out of his skull and it wouldn't make a difference. At least the awful heat feels like something.

Yukari calls him in the morning and asks him if he wants to go to the summer festival at the shrine with her; he mumbles a vague _no thanks_. Then Fuuka, then all the other girls-- he says _no thanks_ to everyone. He's not entirely sure why he does this, exactly. It's too hot. He doesn't feel like it. If they're all going, he doesn't want any of them to yell at him about two-timing them. That would be too much to handle. Elizabeth and Aigis probably wouldn't care about that sort of thing, but they don't ask him out. Maybe they just don't know what a festival is.

Most of the rest of the day he spends staring blankly at the ceiling wondering why he didn't just agree to go on a date. He's not gonna get to see anyone in a yukata... that's such a waste... maybe if he goes on his own, he'll see _everyone_ in their festival outfits and no one will get mad at him.

When the sun sets, Makoto heads downstairs with his hands in his pockets and looks around. No one's around to come along. Not even Koromaru. Koromaru in a yukata would have been good... and maybe he would have fun seeing people enjoying themselves at the shrine... but it's a moot point because Koromaru is out and about. It seems like the girls are gone already. They just went ahead and left without him...? Everybody did.

That makes sense, he supposes. If he said no to everyone, they just assumed he didn't wanna come along. But Mitsuru and Aigis didn't even ask; neither did any of the guys. It's not a big deal, he thinks, and it would be stupid to feel bad about something that's entirely his own fault.

The quiet of the dorm when it's empty has a distinct gloom to it. It's not the same as the quiet it is when everyone is home. Makoto clips his headphones onto his ears and turns up his music to drown out the silence, then stands in the lobby with his hands in his pockets and stares vacantly at the walls for a while.

It would have been nice to go as a group with everyone, but... maybe pretending to be friends would be too much of a bummer. They'd rather spend their festival time actually having fun instead of forcing themselves to do group bonding. That's reasonable.

Ultimately, he ends up leaving the dorm and going to the festival by himself because he doesn't want to be in the empty dorm and not out of any real desire to be at the festival. He keeps his hands in his pockets and his headphones on his ears and wonders if he looks lonely.

The shrine seems bigger and smaller than usual, crammed with festival booths and full of people. It's a far cry from the usual desolation up here. The lights strung up around the festival cast everyone in a soft red and yellow glow. The light is much warmer than what he's used to. He's not sure if it's better than green. It feels less nauseating, but it's so _different_. People cluster around the booths, walk to and fro in pairs and small groups; the air is filled with the chatter of a lot of people talking at once. Girls in yukata with their hair pinned up laugh and take pictures of each other with their phones, tug at the arms of their perpetually-underdressed dates, eat without getting even a little bit of food on their sleeves.

It's unusual for people in Iwatodai to look like they're having a good time. The sound of laughter layered over cheerful crowd-chatter feels wrong, somehow. Usually Makoto being sullen and solitary and tired doesn't look out of place, but here... he doesn't belong here.

When Makoto ambles over to the masks stall, he finds Mitsuru and Aigis inspecting the display and chatting. They're both wearing yukata, as expected; they both look good. Mitsuru has her hair up and the neckline of her yukata is slouched back a bit. Showing an awful lot of neck... He considers telling her it's a bit scandalous, but decides that would be weird.

Makoto lurks behind the two of them until there's a lull in their conversation about masks, then lifts his hand and says, "Hi."

Neither of them react. They continue talking. Makoto freezes up. They must not have heard him, he thinks, but he is standing right behind them so he's not sure how that's possible. Maybe they're not really here at all. Maybe he's hallucinating again. Maybe his voice is quieter than he thought. He waits for them to look over at him, but it doesn't happen.

Aigis and Mitsuru turn and walk away without even glancing over their shoulders at him, still talking. As Makoto withdraws his hand, he feels an uncomfortable chill creeping over him. Watching their backs as they walk away from him feels _ominous_ in a way it shouldn't. His mouth is too dry. Makoto puts his hands back into his pockets and lets his eyes drift to the masks Aigis and Mitsuru were looking at.

_You try to be someone else by wearing a different face..._

"Ahhh, cold shoulder. Classic chick move... what'd you do?" Suddenly, Adachi is here, and he's in Makoto's personal space. Makoto jerks away and turns, shoulders rising. He didn't see him. He should have. This compounds the cold ominous feeling, the tension coiling in his muscles-- there is something very wrong. Adachi looks... the same as ever. Rumpled and dressed for work. He's holding some takoyaki. While Makoto stares at him, trying to figure out if he's losing his mind, Adachi licks a bit of sauce off his thumb and smiles blandly. After a pause just long enough to make it obvious it's not sincere, Adachi gives him a sheepish smile and ruffles his own hair. "Whoops. Didn't mean to scare you."

Makoto shakes his head. "I didn't do anything," he mumbles. "Why are you here?"

"I'm working." Adachi delicately picks up another ball with his thumb and forefinger. He takes a bite, chews, then-- with his mouth full-- adds, "Keeping an eye out for criminal activity."

"Oh." Makoto tilts his head to the side, then glances around again. That sounds like bullshit, but it sounds like normal Adachi bullshit. At least Adachi is the same as always. "Seems like you're just dicking around."

"Harsh!" Adachi whines. He takes a big bite of takoyaki, pouting at him. It's very creepy. "I can slack off _and_ do my job at the same time. That's most of what being an adult is, you know."

Makoto wonders if that's true. Most of what being an adult is... the adults he knows, sure. Ms. Toriumi and Mutatsu and Tanaka definitely like slacking off. He rolls his shoulders back, keeping his hands in his pockets, and mutters, "Whatever..."

Adachi eats his takoyaki in ponderous silence for a minute while Makoto continues to zone out looking at the masks. There's actually only a few designs, they just come in a lot of color variations. That feels like a metaphor for something...

"So, if you're not here on a date, what're you here for? Gawking? Picking up chicks?" Adachi asks casually, once he's finished his food. He crumples up his takoyaki boat and tosses it into a nearby garbage can; the action pulls Makoto's attention away from the masks. The flimsy cardboard bounces off the side of the garbage can with a soft thunk and lands on the hard-packed dirt ground. Adachi sighs, mutters, "Man..." and makes no effort whatsoever to go pick it up.

Makoto blinks slowly at the garbage, then forces himself to inject some actually audible skepticism into his dull monotone and look at Adachi's face when he mutters, "...is that why you're here? Gawking and picking up chicks?"

The festival around them is a whirl of incomprehensible sound and color that he can't at all parse. Adachi is the only thing standing still, so Makoto stares intently at him. If he looks at anything else, he'll feel dizzy and sort of ill.

With a bland chuckle, Adachi holds up his hands and smiles sleepily. "Hey, now, what's with the face? I got game! You don't think I have game?" Makoto shakes his head. Adachi isn't ugly, exactly, but he is definitely offputting. Yukari thinks he's a creep. She's pretty much a normal girl, so if she thinks he's creepy other girls probably do too.

For just a moment, Adachi's harmless façade drops. Makoto tries to figure out if Adachi looks genuinely annoyed or angry or bored or some other emotion entirely, but he can't. Adachi's face is flat and affectless for a few seconds, and then he sighs somewhat dramatically and rubs his neck and it's as if nothing happened at all. "Ouch... for a kid, you sure are mean... that's probably why no one likes you, y'know."

Makoto blinks slowly. "People like me," he says dully. "A bunch of girls wanted me to be their dates today. I said no."

"Oh, is that so?" Adachi says airily. He leans over slightly to put himself closer to eye level and smirks at Makoto. It's condescending, Makoto thinks, considering Adachi isn't that much taller than him to begin with. "Like how Tanaka-san _likes you?_ "

Makoto mumbles a noncommittal, "I guess," and lets his eyes drift back to the mask display.

Adachi makes a dismissive _tshh_ noise and straightens up. Makoto sees him cross his arms over his chest in his peripheral vision. "Pretty guys seriously are stupid, huh? You know being _wanted_ and being _liked_ are different, right? Just because someone thinks you're pretty doesn't mean they actually like you." Adachi pauses for a beat, then adds, "Especially girls. Girls are shallow as hell."

"That sounds like bullshit," Makoto says. He wonders dimly if he should be angry, but decides it's not worth the effort that trying to be angry would take. The mask display is starting to make him feel dizzy-- too many colors and shapes, all of them indistinct and out of focus-- so he fixes his eyes on Adachi's crooked tie.

"Does it?" Adachi sniffs. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe your girlfriends totally care about your life and don't just spend all their time blabbering about their boring personal problems without ever pausing to ask you how you're doing or blatantly ignore you when you're obviously miserable and fucked up."

Makoto stands there with his hands in his pockets and doesn't say anything. They do do that, and they don't care about his life, but admitting that to Adachi seems like a bad idea. It's not a new thought, but it's also not a nice one, and it feels heavier and sadder when he already feels heavy and sad.

"No offense, but if _I_ have a better grip on what's going on in your weirdo brain than the people you live with, that's a pretty blatant sign that they just don't give a shit about you, kiddo," Adachi adds.

That's true. It shouldn't be true, he thinks, but there also shouldn't be twenty-five hours in a day. People don't talk to him because they like anything about him. There's nothing about him to like besides his face and the fact that he listens to people. He doesn't have enough of a personality or enough emotional affect to be likeable. His friends talk to him because they think he's pretty, because they need someone (anyone) to talk to, or because they want someone to do something for them.

Except Adachi. Adachi doesn't talk to him because he's pretty or because he needs to talk to someone to work through his issues. As far as Makoto can tell, he doesn't want anything from him, either-- at least not like how SEES or Igor or Hidetoshi want things from him. Adachi just thinks he's weird and interesting. For anyone else, Makoto could be anybody. Who he is doesn't matter. They just want _someone,_ and him being that someone is just coincidence.

The only other person like that-- who talks to him specifically like Adachi does, who asks him questions about his life, who seems interested in _Makoto Yuki_ \-- is Pharos, and Pharos isn't real.

The fact that he is surrounded by groups of friends feels suddenly sharp and painful. The noise of dozens of overlapping conversations peppered with loud cheerful laughter is too much. Makoto is here, but he may as well not be. He isn't a part of this. He doesn't belong here, and he never will, and that _matters._

A very small part of him notes that Adachi is talking. He's on the phone, somehow. Time is starting to slip away from him. He doesn't parse any of what's coming out of Adachi's mouth and he doesn't care. All he cares about, suddenly, is being anywhere _but_ at this stupid festival. He wants to leave, but his feet are rooted to the spot. If he leaves, he'll just be alone and invisible somewhere else. If no one is at the dorm when he gets home, then he'll be alone. If someone is at the dorm when he gets home, what difference does that make? They won't talk to him except to pester him about going to Tartarus or tell him to go do his homework or something.

The warm colors of the lights strung up around the festival are too warm. His eyes hurt. The red everywhere is creepy; the glow makes it look like everything's bloodstained, and it's hard to look at. He closes his eyes. "I want to leave," he mumbles. "Let's ditch. Buy me food."

Adachi mutters a quiet _hang on a sec_ into his phone, then makes a skeptical noise at Makoto. "What're you talking about? I'm on the clock, here."

Makoto opens his eyes just a little so he can squint at Adachi through his bangs. "Who cares?"

Adachi's mouth twitches into an amused half-smile. "...well, I guess you're a troubled youth, making sure you don't get into any shady business is part of my job..." he says airily. He waves his hand at Makoto and tilts his phone back to say, "Sorry, I gotta jet. Talk to you later."

He snaps his phone shut and puts it away in his jacket pocket, then nods at the stairs down to the street. "Alright, let's go."

The prickling discomfort of being around a bunch of people having fun without him starts to fade once Makoto is about halfway down the stairs. Slipping out of the warm light and descending back down to the cool dark street is relaxing. The stairs have a gentle downward slope, and there's stone walls on either side of him; feeling boxed in is a bit of a relief, compared to the flat open _too much_ of the festival. The street at the bottom is as empty as it always is at night, which is a reassuring return to the norm. He walks Koromaru out this way, and it's a busy night if they see _one_ person out here.

A car drives by as Adachi steps onto the sidewalk; the rush of air ruffles his jacket, flipping it back enough that Makoto can catch a glimpse of the holstered gun at his hip. He wonders idly if the Kirijo Group makes real guns or just fake ones-- it seems like they must have at least one real one. How would they have figured out fake guns work if they didn't test real ones at some point? Maybe Mitsuru would know.

When Makoto's foot hits the last step, Adachi slams him against the wall with one hand on the center of his chest. His head cracks against the stone and he exhales sharply. It hurts. Adachi plants his other hand on the stone wall and leans too far into Makoto's personal space. Being boxed in is no longer a relief. No one at the top of the stairs can see them unless they come look, and Makoto's too much smaller than Adachi to be visible to anyone walking on the street. Not that it matters. No one is looking, and no one is on the street.

"So," Adachi says, his voice low but perfectly conversational in tone. "You still think I don't have game?"

Makoto gazes blankly at Adachi. He tries for a second to figure out what the hell Adachi means by that, but comes up empty. "...What?"

A distinctly mean smirk creeps over Adachi's face. "If it's this easy to get _you_ practically begging me to take you home, how hard do you think it'd be for me to get a girl to do it? You even thought it was your idea."

He opens his mouth to say that it _was_ his idea, but Adachi keeps talking. "People aren't as complicated as they pretend to be," he says airily. "Especially chicks with low self-esteem, which is, y'know, all of them. All I have to do is nudge you in the right direction and your anxiety does all the work for me. 'Tohru's the only person in the world who really cares about me, I'm so alone, I don't want to be alone, I'd rather be with him than alone...'"

That was his thought process, almost exactly; hearing it in Adachi's voice makes him feel sick. If Makoto could shift further back, he would. Since he can't, he tries to keep his breathing shallow to minimize how much his chest presses against Adachi's palm. This stupid scheme shouldn't have worked. Why did it work? The cold stone pressing against Makoto's back and bare arms is making him start to shiver, which doesn't help him feel less small and stupid. It occurs to him that this, too, is probably intentional on Adachi's part.

He's pretty sure _Adachi can control my thoughts and no matter what I do I can never be sure which thoughts are mine and which ones he put there_ is not entirely the correct takeaway from this revelation, but it's the one that sticks. He wonders if it's true, but how could he tell? Nothing Adachi is saying is wrong, exactly, despite how awful it feels.

Since he wants to argue, he picks the only identifiable wrong thing Adachi said and mutters, "I'm not a girl."

"Oh?" That, it turns out, was not the right thing to say. Adachi leans slightly closer, half-lidded eyes glinting, and lifts his palm off Makoto's chest so just his fingertips are pressing him up against the wall. It should feel less heavy, but Makoto still can't quite breathe properly. Adachi lowers his voice again and murmurs, "Only one way to find out for sure."

Makoto's back stiffens and his hands-- still in his pockets-- tighten into fists, fingernails biting into his palms. He opens his mouth to tell Adachi that if he tries anything he can just scream for help, call the cops, punch him-- he's not helpless, Adachi can't just _do whatever_ \--

"Juuuust kidding!" Adachi laughs and flicks Makoto on the chin as he straightens and steps back, amused and cheery as ever. "Wow, your face! You seriously thought I was gonna molest you at a shrine? Fully in public? Kids these days have wild imaginations..."

Forcing himself to move as quickly as he can, Makoto darts away from the wall and onto the sidewalk where there's nothing for him to get trapped against. That didn't seem like a joke. Adachi makes no effort whatsoever to grab him or chase him or whatever, just keeps smiling, hands up and harmless. The shift in mood is so dramatic and complete that Makoto feels physically off-balance.

"C'mooon, I was just messing with you," Adachi says, cajoling, and wrinkles his eyebrows so his smile is simultaneously sheepish and condescending. "Sheesh, you really don't take jokes well... take some deep breaths, Yuki-kun, you're freaking out."

Makoto takes some deep breaths. That felt real, but so did Pharos; he already knows that he can't be trusted to know what's real and what's isn't. If it were anybody else, there's no way something like that would've been a joke, but it's Adachi. Adachi has that kind of bad taste. His heart is still hammering in his chest, but there's no reason for him to be scared. If Adachi hadn't been joking, he wouldn't have stopped. If he hadn't stopped, Makoto could've just screamed or run away or something. But he was just joking. Nothing actually _happened._ Adachi pushed him against a wall and talked to him and Makoto felt uncomfortable.

It's probably fine. It's not any less fine than Tanaka, he thinks, or Ms. Toriumi. It's harmless. He hasn't been harmed.

" _There_ you go," Adachi says. He combs a hand through his hair and glances up at the sky with a rueful look. "Man, taking care of kids really is a thankless job..." he muses, then looks back at Makoto and jabs his thumb over his shoulder. "Whatever. Come on, let's go get you some food, Oliver Twist."

Makoto doesn't move. Going anywhere with Adachi after that seems like a dangerously stupid idea. Adachi tilts his head to the side, then says dryly, "Do you think I'm gonna jump you at Wild Duck Burger? Hate to break it to you, kiddo, but you're not that hot."

Makoto makes a face, which makes Adachi laugh again. "Do what you want, Yuki-kun!" he says, then turns and starts walking away down the sidewalk. Makoto watches him go. On the one hand, Adachi is horrible. On the other hand... everyone is horrible, free food, and now that it's been a few minutes he's not upset any more.

Before Adachi turns the corner at the end of the street, Makoto jogs to catch up with him. "Two burgers," he mutters, and turns up the volume on his music loud enough to drown out anything Adachi might say to him.


	12. Chapter 12

August ends, taking summer with it. Pharos makes his usual _one week until the full moon_ visit, the same as always. School starts up again. SEES gets bigger again. Ken is small and Makoto doesn't know what to do with him; he dimly wonders if it's bad to  have someone so small on the Execution Squad, but doesn't care enough to pursue the concern. Shinjiro is the more interesting of the new additions.

Once Shinjiro's moved in, Makoto slouches over to his bedroom door and knocks on it. It feels weird, because this isn't something any of them _do_ unless there's an emergency, but he wants to talk to Shinjiro when he knows he isn't busy. He'll probably be like everybody else once he's settled in; usually gone, mostly not interested in talking to him at all.

The dorm is as quiet as ever. Downstairs, everyone is getting antsy. The full moon is coming up soon and they haven't been to Tartarus in a while. He's been putting it off with muttered _another time maybe_ and _I'll think about it_ s for too long. They'll go soon, he thinks.

Shinjiro opens the door to his room. Without the coat and hat on, he looks... different. For  one thing, Makoto has a split second where he doesn't recognize him and realizes he's been mostly identifying Shinjiro by his outfit; for another, he's smaller without the coat on. More narrow. Shinjiro keeps his hand on the door, doesn't open it all the way, and gives Makoto a flat irritated look. "...yeah?"

Makoto has to tilt his head up slightly to look at Shinjiro's face. It makes him feel small. "You know Adachi."

Shinjiro's scowl deepens. "Hmph... I know a lot of people."

Makoto lolls his head to the side and rubs at his neck, exhaling an exasperated breath. Talking to guys is so much harder than girls. Girls like talking to him. Guys, not so much. Akihiko and Junpei and Ken and Shinjiro are all sort of mysterious and difficult to engage in any kind of conversation. He's tempted to just give up and leave without even trying, but that would definitely not help improve Shinjiro's opinion of him.

"Adachi's my..." He pauses, eyes drifting to the wall next to Shinjiro's door. What is Adachi? His friend? That's not really right... his babysitter? Acquaintance? Arms dealer? Stalker? None of those are right, but they're not quite wrong either. After a too-obvious pause, Makoto concludes, "Friend. Sort of. He mentioned he knew you."

Shinjiro relaxes a little. He releases his grip on the door and slouches against the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest and letting his scowl soften. It's possible, Makoto thinks, that Shinjiro just has resting bitch face and isn't actually as crabby as he looks. "Huh. Yeah, he's alright. Let me stay on his couch a couple times when the weather was bad," Shinjiro says. He snorts. "Insisted, actually. Guy's persistent."

"What kind of a person do you think he is?" Makoto asks bluntly. He sticks his hands back into his pants pockets and peers up at Shinjiro's face to try and watch his reaction. It's not particularly damning. Shinjiro looks weirded out and annoyed, which is how he looks most of the time when he's around SEES.

Shinjiro scratches behind his ear. "Like I said, he's alright. Persistent. Not a lot of people're willing to help like that. What d'you call it... considerate? Generous?" He wrinkles his nose and shakes his head. "'s not all that dramatic, though. He ain't exactly an angel."

Makoto stares blankly at Shinjiro. Usually people who are willing to talk to him take it as a cue to keep talking. For once, it works on someone he doesn't have a Social Link with. Shinjiro makes a vague frustrated noise and crosses his arms over his chest again. "What I mean is... what kind of person someone is... that's just what kindsa things they _do._ That's the part that really matters. He's been pretty good to me. That's what I know."

Shinjiro's rough grumble of a voice, reluctant and choppy as it is, is reassuringly familiar. He's the type of person Makoto is used to interacting with. He's sort of like Mutatsu, who's sort of like Makoto's dad, so it's almost like having a family.

What kind of a person someone is is made up of what they do... Makoto wonders if he agrees with that. He's not sure. It's not something he thinks much about. He's never much cared what kind of person someone is beyond whether they're interesting and willing to talk to him. This is new.

"So..." He pauses. "He doesn't do weird stuff to you?"

That provokes an actual reaction. Shinjiro's eyes widen in alarm. "What...? 'Weird stuff'? Like what?"

Makoto tilts his head to the side. "Y'know," he says. He mulls over the best way to phrase this for a moment.It's probably best to be straightforward. "...does he touch you?"

Shinjiro chokes, then draws himself up to his full height. "You screwin' with me?" he growls, slamming his hand against the door frame. It's meant to be intimidating. It is, a bit, but Makoto doesn't do anything with the instinctive response. He stays put, facial expression blank. If Shinjiro wants to kick his ass, then he will. If he doesn't, he won't.

"No," he says dully.

Shinjiro stares at him for another long minute, still scowling, then exhales an aggravated breath and looks away, at something in his room. "Tch... I didn't sign up for this..." he mutters under his breath. Then he looks at Makoto again. "What'd he do to you?"

It's a loaded question. Makoto thinks he ought to give it more thought than he does. He answers on instinct. He says, "Nothing," dull and toneless and immediately, and then wonders why he said it. It's not true. Not any more. Adachi did do something to him, didn't he? Slamming him up against that wall? He ponders it, then decides that doesn't count as anything and discards it. He said _no_ because he meant it. Adachi's done nothing to him. Not any more than anyone else; Tanaka, the school nurse, SEES. Adachi hasn't poisoned him or gotten him killed or kidnapped him. Adachi hasn't done anything to him at all, then.

"Bullshit," Shinjiro says flatly. He gives Makoto another long hard look, then makes another annoyed noise when Makoto fails to elaborate any further. "...Tch. Whatever. It's your business."

That sounds like an end of a conversation. Makoto turns to go, but Shinjiro clears his throat to stop him. "Hey... just so you know... if anybody tries to screw with you... you can ask me to back you up or whatever." Makoto glances back at Shinjiro to see him awkwardly fiddling with his hair. "We're on the same team now. Like it or not. So... I got your back."

Makoto blinks slowly at him. He's got his back...? Does everyone in SEES have his back? In the Dark Hour, sure, but if Adachi tried something... probably not. He gives Shinjiro a thumbs up, for lack of a better response. "Cool," he adds.

"Cool," Shinjiro echoes. Then he closes his door behind him, and Makoto is once again alone in the hallway. He stands there for a little while, listening to the hum of the vending machines. He'd hoped to learn something about what Adachi is like with other people, but that didn't work out the way he thought it would. _Alright_ could mean a lot of things.

He clips his headphones back onto his ears and heads out to work on a Social Link before doing a Tartarus run in the evening. The full moon is soon, after all.

 

In the morning before school, Fuuka tells him not to let his guard down; he's not really sure what she's talking about exactly, but he nods at her anyway because she seems nervous. It's his mistake. Telling people that he's worried is always a bad idea. Like telling people that he's not ready, or he's scared, or he doesn't want to do something; they'll either ignore him or they'll feel bad.

He mulls it over while he's staring off into space in class. Voices blur into a dull background murmur. It's weird for Fuuka to be nervous. Her Persona is powerful, and she's never in range of the fighting. She stays where it's safe. Why spend energy being worried when you're not even in danger...? Maybe she's worried about other people getting hurt, because she thinks he'll do a bad job and the Shadow will kill a lot of people. That seems unfair...

Since it's the full moon, he's expected to go straight back to the dorm after school and wait there for the operation to start. This, too, seems a little unfair; do the others think he'll somehow lose track of time for half the day and somehow miss the Dark Hour?

On reflection, maybe it's not that unfair. Makoto's not sure he'd trust himself to stick to a schedule. He's not that reliable, when it comes down to it. Still, out of a sense of rebellion that's too sullen to be anything even remotely resembling anger, he dawdles along an unnecessarily long route back home.

Makoto stops on the sidewalk near his dorm. The three members of Strega are in an alleyway a few buildings away from it, lurking. They're probably up to no good, he assumes, since they're criminals of some kind or something like that. He pauses, tapping the toe of his shoe on the ground while he tries to figure out what to do. Call someone? That seems dramatic. They don't have their Personas outside the Dark Hour. What're they gonna do?

He turns the volume down on his music so he can talk without needing to take off his headphones, then sticks his hands back into his pockets and walks over to the shady alley. "Hey. What're you doing?"

All three members of Strega stop bickering and look at him. The goth girl hugs her chest and glares at him, then glares at Takaya. "Junpei said--"

"It's this one," Takaya says impatiently to her. He smiles at Makoto, sharp and creepy and snide, and adds, "Hello, Makoto Yuki. We were on our way to visit you. How serendipitous that you've approached us."

"Saves us the trouble of breaking in," Jin mutters and adjusts his glasses. His eyes flick to Takaya, who nods almost imperceptibly. That seems meaningful. Probably related to whatever mischief they're planning in this spooky alleyway. Crime, maybe. There's no enormous underground bunkers for locking people in anywhere nearby-- as far as he knows-- so it must be something else this time.

"Why would Junpei lie?" Chidori asks, paying Makoto no mind.

"He's stupid," Makoto suggests. "What did he lie about?"

"Never mind that," Takaya says smoothly. He and Chidori have a strangely similar manner of speaking; slow and smooth and lilting, without much emotional inflection. Makoto isn't sure if he's ever met anyone else who talked like that. Takaya extends his hand to Makoto. "Come with us, brother. We would have words with you regarding your group's actions during the Dark Hour. It would be best to speak of such things away from the prying ears of the public... don't you think?"

The way he talks is almost hypnotic. Makoto doesn't really care about the content of what he's saying, but finds his attention focused solely on Takaya regardless. So much so that he only realizes he's lost track of Jin when he feels a hand on his head and the sharp pain of a needle going into his neck. "Got him," Jin says.

Makoto jerks away as fast as he can, shoving Jin's hand with the needle away, but whatever was in the syringe is now in his neck. Blood is beading at the needle's entrypoint; he rubs at it, smearing the blood over his neck and accomplishing nothing at all. "What did you do?"

He stumbles back, towards the street. Jin makes no effort to stop him; instead, he leans casually against the wall, pulls back one of the sleeves of his weird straitjacket shirt, and gives his watch a bored look. "Could be immediate, could take up to about five minutes," he says to Takaya. "He's skinny. Might be quicker. Don't really know."

"Thank you, Jin." Takaya smiles serenely at Makoto. "I suggest you sit or lie down. Otherwise, you may hurt yourself when you collapse. That wouldn't do."

A warm numbing tingly sensation blooms over Makoto's skin. He rubs at his neck again. This probably isn't good, he thinks vaguely. When he tries to turn and leave the alleyway to go back to the dorm, he loses his footing and knocks against the wall of the building on his right. The ground underneath him dips and rolls, and Makoto cannot for the life of him remember what he was doing. He forgets to lean against the wall because he can't quite remember if he has hands or not, then topples to the ground. It doesn't hurt, but he mumbles, "Ow," anyway.

Somewhere a hundred feet above him, Strega is talking. Their voices fade in and out like a badly-tuned radio. Makoto lies facedown on the ground. Maybe his MP3 player is glitching out, and that's why their voices sound so weird. Does that make sense? He's pretty sure that doesn't make sense. Jin says, "...than expected. Think we should tell ... ? Relevant ... interests."

Takaya says something longwinded and spooky, probably, that Makoto can't parse at all. His entire body is tingling and numb and warm. He thinks he must be staring at something, because he's dimly aware of a watery feeling in his eyes that means he needs to blink, but he's not sure he can actually see anything. It doesn't hurt like it should, though. Neither does his neck any more. Neither does the scrape he's pretty sure he has on his face from falling over.

Time becomes a distant incoherent concept. Someone picks him up off the ground. Makoto blacks out.


	13. Chapter 13

Losing time isn't a completely foreign concept to Makoto, but this is different. When he blearily blinks a few times and finds himself tied to a chair in some kind of barren apocalypse apartment, he has no memory of how he got there at all. Not even a little. Usually time becomes a weird smear; incomprehensible and impossible to keep track of, but not quite _gone._ This is more like waking up. He's not sure if he was unconscious or not, but he supposes he must have been.

The room he's in is dimly lit, with no windows. The floor is some kind of concrete. The room has no decorations, either, but there's some furniture. A couch, a coffee table, a normal table, some chairs. There are a few doors leading to other rooms-- probably bedrooms, if this is an apartment-- and there's a kitchen that Makoto can only see part of because it's mostly behind him. The kitchen is empty. This place doesn't look lived in. It must be a temporary hideout kind of deal.

Jin is sitting on the couch, hunched over the coffee table, rattling away on a laptop. Takaya is lounging against the wall. Chidori isn't anywhere Makoto can see, but he can't see much, so he assumes she's just in another room.

Makoto notes all of this information about his surroundings slowly and carefully. He's sluggish and out of it, and every thought he doesn't grab onto deliberately and hold in his mind seems to slip out of his grasp never to be seen again.

"Oh? You seem to be conscious again," Takaya says. "How are you feeling?"

Makoto licks his lips, which feel dry and foreign. Dry and foreign, he thinks, is a bad combination for lips. This is probably where he ought to have some kind of reaction to this situation. He blinks a few more times and tries to remember what the situation is.

It seems that he's been kidnapped. Is that scary? He can't tell. He feels sick and disoriented, and everything else is too far away to be felt. "Not great," he mumbles at Takaya. Takaya chuckles.

"I apologize for the rough handling, but this was the least violent way to separate you from the others," he says. "Now, then. To business. We'd like you to call off your little operation for tonight."

Makoto squints at Takaya. "...huh?"

"Tell your friends not to fight the Shadow tonight," Jin says, raising his voice unnecessarily. It's a little too loud. Makoto winces. "Call it off. You're the leader. They'll listen to you."

That's not true, _and_ it's a bad idea. There's no way anyone would listen to him if he told them to just not kill the Shadow tonight. They'd just do it anyway. Luckily this kidnapping happened early in the day; they'll have time to get him back before the Dark Hour starts. "Nah," he says.

"Hahaha... well, I didn't think it would be so easy. That's alright. We'll just keep you here for now. Cut off the head of the snake, as it were," Takaya says serenely.

"Your 'friends' will either waste their time trying to find you, thus leaving the Shadow to its own devices, or they will carry on without you. Fighting at such a disadvantage... I wonder if they'll survive?"

Takaya smiles fondly at nothing in particular, as if this is a pleasant thought experiment. Makoto's pretty sure they'll be fine without him. Mitsuru and Akihiko did okay with just Yukari for a while, and now they've got a lot of people who're all really strong. Aigis is designed to fight Shadows on her own. He can't imagine SEES abandoning the Shadow fight to come and track him down. Not all of them, anyway.

If it was up to him, he'd have Fuuka find the Shadow first. Mitsuru, Aigis, Shinjiro, and Koromaru could handle the Shadow, leaving Yukari and Junpei and Akihiko and Ken to come find him. Fuuka should find the Shadow first and stick with that group, then find him and give the others some directions. Mitsuru's smart, so she'll probably come up with a plan that's better than whatever he could come up with.

Makoto says, "Yeah, they'll be fine."

Takaya looks annoyed. Jin snorts, but doesn't stop typing. Makoto shifts a little on the chair. His wrists are tied behind his back and to the chair. It's made of wood. If he were really buff, he could probably break it. Unfortunately, he isn't particularly strong. His feet at tied at the ankles to the legs of the chair, which is uncomfortable. He experimentally twists his wrists to see if he can somehow wriggle free, but it doesn't feel likely.

"Tell me, Makoto Yuki. Why do you wish to eliminate the Dark Hour?" Takaya asks, fixing his eerie yellow eyes on Makoto's face. "The Dark Hour is what gives your life meaning. To erase it is to erase a part of yourself."

"Who cares?" Makoto says blandly, staring back at Takaya. "If we don't stop them, the Shadows and Apathy Syndrome will kill people."

Takaya sneers. "Oh? So it's better to eliminate these sources of mass suffering entirely...?" This seems obvious. Makoto nods, then winces because that was a bit too much head movement and now he feels dizzy. "And what of the Kirijo Group? The ones responsible for everything you aim to prevent, and so much more? What of its heiress?"

"Senpai?" Makoto mumbles. He's too fuzzy and confused to figure out what Takaya is getting at. The mesmerizing lilting tone of Takaya's voice isn't helping. He can't quite focus entirely on what he's saying. "...what about her?"

"Should she not be eliminated, too?" Takaya presses. He tilts his head to the side and his smile widens. "Before she can kill people, like her father and his before him? She cannot help her purpose or heritage any more than the Shadows you exterminate. Yet if you wish to entirely eliminate the Dark Hour for the danger it poses to mankind, the Kirijo Group must surely follow soon after... kill the hydra before it can grow more heads."

Makoto has run out of vague confused things to say, so he just gazes in Takaya's direction. Keeping his eyes open all the way and focused is too difficult; his eyelids sag and his vision blurs a little. Takaya is so pale that he looks like he's glowing under his strange tattoos. It's weird. The longer Makoto looks at Takaya, the more unsettling details he picks up. Like how his skin has a gray corpselike tint to it. The sharp edges of Takaya's bones pressing against his corpselike skin are uncomfortably prominent.

"Have you yet to confront the truth? Is your vision still so clouded by familiarity?"

Makoto's eyes drift along Takaya's collarbone. He wonders if it would pierce through his skin if he pressed hard enough. That would be gross. It seems possible. Takaya's skin looks thin. Maybe it would tear like paper.

Takaya looks away. Makoto watches the pull and shift of his skin with interest. It doesn't tear. "I wonder if it wouldn't be better to kill you, too..." he muses. "Jin?"

"Better to see how SEES deals with tonight first," says Jin. His typing has been so rapid and constant that Makoto started to think it was rain. He looks back at Jin, but Jin hasn't looked up or stopped. It's hard to tell if they're serious about killing him and/or Mitsuru. It's hard to tell how serious they are about anything, since they look so stupid. Either this whole thing is a very elaborate joke or they're completely serious about all of it, he thinks.

Takaya lolls his head to one side, considering this, then pushes off the wall and steps towards Makoto. "It would be a shame to waste so much potential... the hero with a thousand faces," he murmurs, planting a hand on the back of Makoto's chair and leaning over him to stare at his face up close. Makoto stares at Takaya's pale yellow eyes; he doesn't see any faint outline in the whites to indicate that he's wearing colored lenses. He wonders if this means that Chidori's hair is naturally that red color, too; it looks like it ought to be a wig, but maybe not.

Up close-- setting aside the discomfort of having someone in his personal space-- Takaya is less unsettling. All the small details that add up into a person are more clearly visible. Takaya takes up the bulk of Makoto's field of vision, so it's hard to ignore the grim reality of what's in front of him. Takaya looks so sick-- so poorly-maintained-- that Makoto can't help thinking of a starving animal. Something feral and pathetic. And he's homeless, if this weird grungy apartment is anything to go by. It's a lot more sad than creepy.

"Your life seems sad," Makoto mumbles. "Maybe you should get a hobby."

Despite this being his best attempt at actual advice, Takaya seems pretty peeved. His face twists into a scowl and he punches Makoto in the face. It's a surprise. His head snaps to the side, ears ringing, and Takaya shifts back a bit. The impact doesn't quite hurt; he can definitely feel it, but the pain isn't nearly as sharp or pronounced as he thinks it's supposed to be. He can taste blood in his mouth. "I think you aren't taking this seriously," Takaya says coolly.

Makoto runs his tongue over his teeth. None of them feel broken, which is good because he doesn't know if a Persona spell could fix it if something in his face got broken. "I am," he says dully. It's not convincing, if Takaya's continued bitter scowl is anything to go by. Instinctively he tries to reach a hand up to rub at his cheek; he tugs at the rough rope wrapped tight around his wrists and accomplishes nothing.

"You _will_ ," Takaya tells him grimly. Jin makes a noise that sounds like it must be his version of a laugh.

Some amount of time passes... Makoto spends the day getting smacked around. His best guess is that it's a couple of hours, but the time slips away from him in such an incomprehensible blur that he couldn't say for sure how long it is. Violence isn't engaging enough to keep the day from fading, and there's nothing else he can focus on. His headphones are gone, probably on the sidewalk somewhere, so he can't zone out listening to music. His options are disengaging completely or fully experiencing getting viciously beaten; naturally, he prefers to just zone out.

At some point whatever was dulling the pain wears off; Makoto notes each jolt of pain as if from a distance. _Ah, yes; a broken nose. That_ is _painful, isn't it?_ The blood in his mouth runs back into his throat, making him gag, but he doesn't actually vomit. He just gags and chokes and coughs as blood continues to trickle down his throat.

It hurts a lot; so much so that it's actually a bit of a relief when Jin injects him with something again. Everything goes duller and vaguer than it already was and nothing hurts any more.

 

Makoto registers some noises. The door opening, knuckles drumming against the doorframe, footsteps, voices. They're hazy. Everything is hazy. He's not entirely sure where his body is. He is, in fact, sitting in the same chair he's been in all day; untied, now, but completely immobile. Moving around is impossible. The noises get dismissed quickly, since it takes about a hundred years for the noises to actually mean anything. By the time Adachi's in his field of vision, Makoto's already half-forgotten that the door opened.

"Hey, kid. Slacking off on the clock?" Adachi says pleasantly. Makoto stares at him; Adachi is blurry, but there in front of him. He's got his sleeves rolled up. No jacket or tie. He must be done with work.

Makoto opens his mouth and takes a shuddering breath. The air tastes like blood. "You're blurry," he mumbles.

"That's because you're crying."

"Oh." And so he is. When Makoto tries to breathe again it's snuffly and hacking, interrupted by his body's insistence on weeping. He blinks a few times to get tears out of his eyes, with moderate success.

Adachi exhales an amused breath and ruffles his hair, then shifts away. "Glasses, where's Chidori-chan?" he asks. The combination of words sounds to Makoto like complete nonsense.

Jin makes a sharp annoyed noise. "Probably still sulking in her room," he mutters, and punctuates it by hitting some keys on his keyboard with unnecessary force.

"Perfect. Maybe she's dead," Adachi says. He winks at Makoto, then heads over to one of the doors in the apartment with a chipper spring in his step. "I'll be taking Yuki-kun off your hands when I'm done. You guys had your fun, right?"

"Wait," Makoto mumbles. Everyone is talking too fast for him to process what they're saying.  It sounded like Adachi said he was going to _take him?_ Where? Back to the dorm so he can meet back up with SEES, probably. He can fight the Shadow. If he gets back in time, it'll be like nothing happened. Akihiko might ask him where he's been, but no one will be mad. Hopefully by the time he gets back he'll be able to move his arms.

Jin stops typing. "You're taking him?"

"Well, it's not like anybody else is gonna do it. Kirijo and her merry men are on the trail of this month's tentacle monster already," Adachi sighs. "Sakaki-kun won't mind! You got your jollies already, right? Ah, not to mention that if you don't let me take him, I'm gonna have to take you in. My civic duty and all that..."

Takaya chuckles. He's just out of Makoto's eyesight, and Makoto can't seem to actually turn his head to look at him. Whatever he says, Makoto loses track of it. He tries to keep his eyes on Adachi, but Adachi says something and gives him a little wave and then slips away into the other room. Closes the door behind him.

"What's... he...?" If SEES left already, that means it's the Dark Hour already. They're really going to just do it without him? That's no good. Adachi has to take him to them, doesn't he? Where is he? Makoto can't quite speak, so he finishes the sentence with a vague confused noise, to which no one responds.

Everything blurs, and then he's somehow on the street and several feet off the ground. It takes a minute for him to figure out that Adachi is carrying him on his shoulders. He isn't sure what to say about it, so he just groans.

"Oh, you snapped out of it again. Having fun, Yuki-kun?" Adachi asks cheerfully. Out here, everything is bathed in green light from the huge looming full moon. It _is_ the Dark Hour. "Think you can walk? Carrying you is seriously a pain in the ass. You might be skinny, but I'm feeble! I'm not even getting paid overtime for this."

Makoto experimentally attempts to move one of his feet. It sort of works, he thinks. He can't entirely tell. Adachi seems to take his silence to mean _yes,_ which if he were more conscious would strike him as deeply troubling, and stops walking. The entire world lurches; Adachi bends over, pulls Makoto off his shoulders, and sets him on the sidewalk, where he promptly collapses in a useless heap.

The pain is starting to creep back, needling its way through the thick wall of fog to stab at his face and chest and legs and wrists. His wrists are chafed. His face is busted. Something is probably broken somewhere. Makoto lies on his side, curled slightly in on himself on the rough cracked sidewalk, and gazes dully at the blackened bits of grass poking out of the pavement. Adachi groans and stretches and rubs at his shoulders, griping some more about how much of a hassle it was to carry him. Makoto tunes him out easily. He has questions that he should ask, even if it's difficult to think clearly.

"Strega drugged me," he says.

"Hm? Well, yeah. At least twice, it looks like. You dying down there?" Adachi nudges him with the toe of his shoe. "C'mon, I don't wanna carry you any more."

Makoto closes his eyes and mumbles, "Ketamine?"

"Heh." He doesn't need his eyes open to tell there's a smirk spreading over Adachi's face. "Another fantastic deduction from the boy detective. You're on a roll. Wanna try another?"

He shakes his head, shifting it slightly back and forth. The pavement is cold against his skin, and scraping his already split bruised face against it sends a twinge of unexpected pain lancing through his skull. "Ow," he says, without much enthusiasm.

"No? You're no fun..." Adachi sighs. Makoto opens his eyes again to look up at Adachi, who is rubbing his neck and gazing off into space like he's the most put-upon person in the world. The green light washes him out, so much so that he seems like he's almost blending into the background. There's nothing distinctive about him at all. He's like the polar opposite of Strega.

"Why'd you come get me?" Makoto mumbles. He remains curled up on the ground. It's undignified, but he very much doubts that Adachi cares. Getting up is hard and pointless. There's no need for him to be standing up if they're just talking.

The delay before Adachi responds is familiar; the familiarity is, if not exactly _comforting,_ grounding. After a second, Adachi glances down at him and smiles wryly. "No 'thank you, officer?' Kids these days have such bad manners."

"Why?" Makoto presses. Adachi flaps his hand at him in a dismissive impatient gesture.

"Always so suspicious. You're probably assuming I'm pulling some sort of villainy, right? Well, I'm not. I'm just taking you back to my place to patch you up a bit. As for why...?" He hums, the noise an affectless mockery of thoughtfulness, dull eyes gazing not at all thoughtfully at nothing. He clicks his tongue after that odd bored pause and gives Makoto a dull-eyed smile. "Not telling. Isn't it more fun to leave some stuff to the imagination?"

"No," Makoto says dully. "Are you going to kill me?"

"What?!" Adachi feigns shock and offense, as he always does when they have these kinds of conversations. "Me?! Kill you?? Gosh, Yuki-kun! I would never do something like that! How horrible... of course I'm not going to kill you!"

That seems true enough. Makoto decides that if Adachi was going to kill him, he'd have done it by now. He makes a vague affirmative noise, then closes his eyes again. Everything hurts so much. If he goes back, SEES will bother him about missing the full moon.

SEES didn't come looking for him. As far as he can tell, they didn't even try. For once-- maybe because everything hurts, or because of the drugs, or because he's tired-- that actually feels like something. It feels like too much. His eyes water as he suddenly finds himself overwhelmed by hurt and frustration and loneliness. They left him there. _Adachi_ is the one who came for him. Not even Aigis showed up. After everything they've made him do, they couldn't even be bothered to look for him? And he _knows_ that they're going to be fine without him-- which means they didn't need to force him to do so much for them in the first place-- and that they're going to lecture him and be upset for no reason. This _sucks._

Childish as it is, Makoto just wants someone to be nice to him and he doesn't want to go home to get yelled at.

He looks up at Adachi, who is blurry again. He inhales a feebly shaky breath, then asks, "Can I stay over tonight?" When he speaks, his voice is high and thin and completely pathetic. It doesn't even sound like his voice. It's hard to make out Adachi's reaction through the tears and the exhaustion, but he's pretty sure Adachi is still smiling.

"Sure," Adachi says. The offhand tone feels practiced and artificial; for a moment Makoto wonders if this was Adachi's plan all along, but being suspicious burns energy that got beaten out of him hours ago. So what if it was some sort of stupid elaborate scheme? It doesn't really matter.

Adachi helps him to his feet and lets Makoto lean on him on the way back to his place. The Dark Hour ends while they're walking, though Makoto's eyes still feel like they're stained green. The shift in color is too jarring to adjust to gracefully. When they get into Adachi's apartment and he flicks on the lights, yellowish and warm and ordinary, Makoto squeezes his eyes shut. It looks _wrong_.

"Thanks," Makoto says, after Adachi has propped him up on the couch. He's not usually polite enough to thank people for anything, but this whole _Adachi being helpful_ thing feels precarious enough that being rude risks ruining the whole thing.

Before he goes to fetch his first aid kit, Adachi snaps several cellphone pictures of Makoto and gives him an unpleasant smile. He says, bland and light as ever, "You're so pathetic I actually kind of feel bad for you."

Makoto flicks his tongue out over his lips, attempts to pull his mouth into the shape he remembers a smile being, then croaks, "Liar."

"Ouch!" Adachi laughs, checks the pictures on his phone, then retrieves his first aid kit.

Somewhat to Makoto's surprise, Adachi is professional and effective. He only touches Makoto as much as he has to, to push his hair aside or adjust the position of his arm or whatever. He checks him over, then makes him take a shower and change into some borrowed clothes before sticking gauze and bandages and bruise ointment on his various injuries. The whole thing feels simultaneously ordinary and deeply wrong; Makoto expects something else, something unpleasant or gross or weird. Adachi doesn't do anything unpleasant or gross or weird, and it's unnerving. For a little while, Makoto gets stuck on trying to figure out if maybe he's been wrong about Adachi all along or if this is some kind of trick, but ultimately decides that trying to figure it out isn't worth the effort. It won't work. It's easier to just let things be what they are.


	14. Chapter 14

The next morning arrives, as mornings tend to. Makoto wakes up on Adachi's couch, in pain and exhausted. The injuries all over his body have not magically healed overnight. If anything, they hurt more now than they did before. The pain is a firm reminder that what happened to him was real; this would be more reassuring if he could clearly remember what it was that happened. He knows the gist of it, but the specifics are lost to the fog.

His headphones are not around his neck. His clothes are not on his body. Adachi's shirt and sweatpants aren't uncomfortable, but the texture of them is unfamiliar and they don't smell like his dorm. Nothing feels outright wrong, but everything feels just a little bit off.

The apartment smells like food, which means Adachi is already up and in the kitchen. The thought of food reminds him that he's probably hungry, though he isn't sure which of the cacophanous uncomfortable sensations in his body is the 'hungry' one and which ones are injury or exhaustion or whatever. One of them is probably hunger. If he can't remember the last time he ate, that means it's probably time to eat. Nerves jangling, Makoto haults himself up off the couch. He staggers, legs nearly buckling. With heroic effort, he shuffles across the room into the tiny kitchen.

"Morning," Adachi says without looking at him. If he notices that Makoto has forgotten how operating a human body works, he's polite enough not to mention it.

There's no food ready yet for Makoto to scarf down, so he leans against the counter to watch Adachi cook. Watching people prepare food is interesting. He never gets to watch anyone cook in the dorm. Fuuka must do it, but somehow he always misses it.

"Eggs are just about done," Adachi says with a yawn. He blinks sleepily at the eggs and prods one with his spatula. "...Probably. I don't really cook unless I have to, so who knows how this is gonna turn out."

"Do you have to right now?" Makoto asks.

"Well, a starving miserable orphan I know slept on my couch last night," Adachi says lightly. Makoto peers at him, but Adachi doesn't look back. He just keeps doing his own thing. "Y'know, I think I read somewhere that having guests inspires good habits... or something like that. You know, cleaning up more, eating healthier... something about performance or social pressure or something like that. Anyway, you want coffee?"

Adachi's spatula scrapes shrilly against the pan when he picks up the four fried eggs and puts them onto four pieces of toast. The spatula gets tossed in the sink with a clatter. Each step of this process is simple and mundane, but Makoto watches with interest anyway. Normal stuff is interesting; it's especially interesting when it's someone as weird as Adachi doing it. Makoto is so focused on watching him be normal that he almost forgets to actually answer the question. "Sure," he mumbles.

"You know, this is starting to be a regular thing... maybe I should start charging you rent," Adachi says, sounding amused. He pours two cups of coffee and retrieves a half-gallon of milk from the fridge. Making a face, he unscrews the cap and sniffs it suspiciously before pouring some in his coffee. "Or at least grocery money. Teenagers really are bottomless pits when it comes to food."

Adachi is joking, but Makoto _does_ feel that he owes Adachi something. Adachi cooked for him. He's stayed over more than just once, eats his food, wears his clothes... Adachi carried him out of Strega's hideout and gave him first aid. That's a lot; more than most people Makoto knows. Usually Makoto is the one being helpful, giving his Social Links what they want, helping them with stuff-- but with Adachi it's a different kind of lopsided, and it makes him uncomfortable.

Makoto tilts his head to the side, messy hair falling into his face, and braces his palms against the hard edge of the kitchen counter. "I don't have much money on me," he says dully.

"Actually, you have _no_ money on you. Sakaki-kun and Shirato-kun took all your cash."

Makoto wonders if he should be upset. It wasn't _that_ much... probably. He's already forgotten how much money he had. He ponders the loss only briefly before he suggests, in the same dull monotone he says everything else, "I could pay you with my body."

He could smile, to make it a joke, but he doesn't. It _is_ a joke, but he'll let Adachi take it however he wants. If Makoto can genuinely pay him back with his body, it would be convenient. Makoto stares vacantly at Adachi while he waits for Adachi to load up his delayed response, wondering dimly how difficult sucking dick actually is. Probably not that hard.

Adachi doesn't seem startled or flustered or alarmed, and he doesn't bother to fake any of those things. He also doesn't laugh. His eyes flick to Makoto and he turns slightly, leaning one hand on the counter. After a beat, Adachi's mouth pulls into a not-quite-smile. It sends an uncomfortable shiver up Makoto's spine, which he assumes is the response Adachi was hoping for.

The look Adachi gives him, eyes wandering over his body, isn't like being checked out at school. It's not appreciative or hungry or even especially interested. Makoto made him an offer; Adachi is considering it. His eyes linger on the skin left exposed by Makoto's too-big borrowed shirt. It's hard to tell for sure, but Makoto is pretty sure that Adachi's attention is drawn more by the bruises than by the skin.

It's strange, feeling so uncomfortable yet so completely detached from the situation. It's like his body is frightened but he himself is not. Instinct screams at Makoto to move away as fast as possible, but he doesn't. He's not sure what it is he's scared of; no distinct scenario presents itself when he tries to put words to the feeling. _Maybe he'll rape me,_ he thinks, but that thought doesn't feel like anything at all; not frightening and certainly not real. _Maybe he'll kill me and eat my corpse._ Also not frightening.

Adachi takes a step forward and leans over Makoto, bracing a hand against the cupboards overhead so Makoto's boxed in. It's the same move he pulled at the festival, although this time feels different. At the festival, they were in public. Adachi was joking. Makoto was fully clothed. Here, now, the situation is considerably more precarious for Makoto.

Makoto stares up at him, gripping the counter hard enough that the edge of it digs painfully into his palms. Adachi looks back at him and says nothing. His eyes are dark and empty, devoid of any kind of emotion. There's nothing there. He doesn't look predatory or grim or teasing. The emptiness behind his eyes is unsettling on some basic lizard-brain level, and the kind of panic that sets in has nothing to do with logic or common sense or anything he knows about Adachi. There isn't something he's scared of Adachi _doing;_ he is scared of Adachi.

He should have said he was joking.

Adachi's free hand lifts and Makoto flinches a little bit as it approaches his face. He is too aware of how hard his heart is hammering; it feels like each beat of it shakes his entire body. When he inhales, the breath is audibly shaky.

Adachi smacks him gently on the side of the head. "What's with that face? Obviously I'm not take you up on it." He pushes a bit of Makoto's hair out of his eyes and smiles sharply. The wolfish grin is at odds with his light airy tone when he adds, "Really, Yuki-kun, if you think I'm that kind of guy, shouldn't you avoid making those sort of jokes...? You freaked yourself out! It's hard to deal with you when you keep doing that kind of thing..."

Then he shifts away, casually, like nothing just happened, and sets about actually eating breakfast. Dazed, Makoto stays where he is, holding onto the counter so he doesn't collapse.

"You should hurry up and eat if you're planning on making it to school today."

After all that... he still has school. Makoto doesn't miss school, ever, under any circumstances; looking like he got hit by a truck is probably a good excuse to take an absence, especially since his school uniform is still bloody, but ruining his perfect attendance record just because he looks bad seems like too much of a waste. Makoto shuffles to the table and sits down, mumbling, "Thanks for the food."

 

Predictably, Makoto spends much of the day being accosted. SEES wants to know where he's been. Ms. Toriumi wants to know what happened to his face. After school the whole squad gathers downstairs to argue about the whole incident.

Mitsuru says, "You have a _responsibility._ "

Fuuka says, "Maybe we should get you to a hospital."

Junpei says, "What do you mean, Chidori's with Strega?!"

Akihiko mostly sits in grim silence. Koromaru barks, but Aigis only translates about half of what he's saying (he was worried, apparently) so he doesn't get a lot of input. Junpei has a lot of half-shouted anxious questions about Chidori, none of which Makoto has satisfactory answers to. Apparently they're dating or Junpei _thought_ they were dating or something like that.

They argue and chatter about it for a while, while Makoto stares off into space and waits for them to be finished. They were worried, but they're more annoyed with him than anything. It was an inconvenience. It was inconsiderate. Why didn't he fight them off? Why didn't he try to escape? They're going to be extra careful with him on full moons from now on so this never happens again. It was just luck that they made it through this month without him, apparently, even though it seems like they were totally fine.

He's so busy spacing out that he doesn't really register Shinjiro staring intently at him in grouchy silence the whole time, and he doesn't notice Shinjiro following him upstairs after everyone's done talking. Not until Shinjiro says, loudly, "Hey."

Makoto stops outside of his room, hands in his pockets, and turns around. Shinjiro looks uncomfortable, as he often does, but vaguely concerned. Scowling, he says, "You said Adachi took you back to his place. He and those guys... Strega... they know each other."

There's no question. Makoto pauses, waiting for one, then eventually just nods and says, "I know."

Shinjiro grinds his teeth. "It sounds like he's screwing with you," he says curtly. "Watch your back."

The empty silence in Makoto's ears makes every little interaction a thousand times more uncomfortable than it ought to be. He'd have his headphones on, but it seems they're gone for good. He'll have to get new ones. The thought is depressing; knowing himself, he'll never get it together enough to actually do that. "I promised I wouldn't miss another full moon," he says dully, rubbing his thumb over one of his earlobes.

"I ain't talking about that," Shinjiro mutters. "I'm talkin' about you staying safe. This SEES bullshit isn't the only thing in life that matters." He pauses for a breath, looking annoyed, then looks away. "Tch. Remember to have someone fix your face tonight. You look like hell."

Makoto nods mutely, and Shinjiro slouches off back downstairs.

 

Junpei is more upset than anybody thought he would be. He keeps coming up to Makoto and pressing him for details about Chidori; it's actually kind of annoying. Something about how they _have to save her_ from the other two, and how it can't possibly be that Chidori is some kind of _bad guy_ , and if he could just find her and talk to her he knows this would all 'work out.'

What he means by 'work out' is unclear. Makoto doesn't have much to tell him, which Junpei finds deeply frustrating. He drops the subject eventually, though. Everyone's annoyance and worry about the kidnapping on the full moon fades within a week, as everything settles back into the usual routine. Nothing is different. It may as well have not even happened.

Makoto avoids Adachi for a while, sort of. It's not really _avoiding_ ; he just doesn't go to see him. Adachi's still around, in his peripheral vision. Coincidentally in the same places as him, not acknowledging his presence but definitely _there._ Going back to the police station at the mall is an inevitability, if only just to check to see if there's anything good available or try to convince Adachi to buy some ugly magical keychains, but Makoto puts it off.

When Pharos comes back a week after the full moon wonders aloud if their _relationship_ is going to _evolve_ , Makoto is twitchy and prickly all the next day. He's exhausted and unnerved and isn't sure what to do with the jittery unnerved feeling under his skin. What does that _mean?_ If he knew what Pharos was, he'd know what it means, but all he knows is that they have a Social Link and only Makoto can see him and Pharos may or may not be able to see the future.

Having his relationship "evolve" with a scary ghost doesn't feel like a good thing. Is he going to die? Is he going to start hallucinating during the day? Is something going to happen that might change their relationship...? That feels like it can't possibly be good.

It nags at him in the back of his head for days. There's no one he can ask about it, though, so eventually he just lets it slip away the way everything inevitably does.

 

Everyone is going straight home after school on the 18th. No club practice. Everyone's very worried about the forecasted typhoon; people have been talking about it for days. Makoto decides to head straight to the dorm after class gets out, too, to stay out of the rain.

That's his plan, but somehow it doesn't quite work out. He starts walking, gazing vacantly at the ominous dark clouds, and he ought to have plenty of time before it starts raining, but everything is so slippery. He loses track of himself and only realizes it happened when a torrential downpour soaks through his uniform in seconds. He shudders and sprints to the monorail, then sprints the whole way to the dorm.

Running the whole way may have been a mistake, he thinks. When he shuts the door behind him, shivering and dripping on the carpet, he's out of breath and lightheaded.

"You weren't quick enough, huh?" Junpei says. Makoto's teeth are chattering. He wonders vaguely if he should bother asking Junpei and Yukari and et cetera why they didn't even ask if he wanted to walk home together. They live in the same dorm. They go to the same school. Did they assume he was busy...?

No one else greets him, loud and late though his entry was. Everyone is around, though. Makoto sticks his hands in his pockets, shivering, and squelches his way over to the couches. It's hard to catch his breath. His teeth chattering are too noisy, so he resigns himself to shivering. No one seems to notice. They chat as a group, briefly and stiffly, before splitting off to do their own things.

Makoto's own thing, tonight, is going to bed. It's early, still, but he is exhausted and cold and soggy and he doesn't want to be awake. He slouches off to his room, still shivering, and peels off his soaked uniform. He changes into something dry and comfortable, thinking dimly that he _ought_ to at least take a warm shower if he's not going to have a bath, and then collapses into bed.

He was only planning on lying down for a bit before getting back up and taking a bath, but he's unconscious on top of his blankets within seconds.

 

The familiar sensation of the elevator rattling as it climbs ever upwards comes to him first, and then his vision slowly clears. Music echoes in his ears, faint enough that it might not be real. Makoto blinks blearily and looks around. He's in the Velvet Room.

"I have been waiting for you. I last summoned you in your dreams quite some time ago. Several seasons have come and gone since I first offered my assistance," Igor says, smiling as broadly as he always is. "Now, then... your special power. Persona. Have you been using it wisely?"

At least the Velvet Room isn't cold and he's not standing up. The chair he woke up in isn't comfortable, but it's a chair. He's not sure he has the energy to stay on his feet. Makoto glances at Elizabeth, who's standing where she always stands, next to Igor's weird throne couch. She smiles and gives him a little wave. "Of course," he says. He's been doing what he's supposed to do. They know that. Or they should, anyway.

Igor looks unimpressed. He hums. "So you haven't given it much thought," he says.

Makoto furrows his brow. What the hell is that supposed to mean? What hasn't he thought about? Why is that _wrong?_ He's just doing the thing he's supposed to be doing. If it's not what he's supposed to be doing, then... why are they letting him do it? Makoto mutters, "Huh?" but Igor doesn't seem to hear him. Or care. One of the two.

Igor clears his throat and gestures with one hand. A tarot card appears in the center of the round table between them, glowing softly. "I sense a great catastrophe in your future," Igor says. "As you approach it, you must be sure that you are prepared... that the Social Links you foster are conducive to your growth along your journey... so that when the time comes, you may draw the strength and resolve from them that the situation requires."

Igor says all this with a slow deliberate sense of tactfulness, like he's dancing around saying something that would be _unseemly_ to bring up directly. Makoto stares blankly at the card on the table. He isn't sure he knows what Igor is getting at. He mumbles, "I don't know what you mean."

The card lifts up off the table and turns to face him. It's not one he recognizes, but at the same time he does; it feels like when he fuses a new Persona. He knows it, even though he's never seen it before. It's a tarot card, but not one of the normal ones. XI, but it's not Strength. A silhouette of a nude woman, suspended limp in the air over a mass of shadowy beasts.

"Lust!" Elizabeth declares cheerfully. She touches one gloved hand to her mouth, smiling mischieviously. "I am sure its presence in your heart comes as no surprise to you, dear guest. It is my understanding that this sin is 'deadly'... yet humans embrace it for 'fun' quite frequently... isn't it curious? To tempt death for the sake of fleeting pleasure..."

Igor clears his throat to cut off Elizabeth's rambling. "It is not our place to interfere. Merely to guide. To... _suggest,_ " he says, gesturing with one hand at Makoto. "The relationships you foster... the decisions you make... the people you encounter... your journey is _yours,_ not ours. You choose your own path."

At that, Elizabeth's smile fades slightly. She rests her palm on the cover of her compendium and drops her gaze. "Your destination--" is all she gets out before Igor cuts her off again.

"Every human life is equal in the end. Every journey has the same ultimate destination," he says, as calm and pleasant and strange as ever. Makoto furrows his brow at him, so Igor gives him a somewhat sympathetic smile. He elaborates, "Memento mori."

Is it worth telling him that he doesn't know what that means? Probably not. Adachi will know. Makoto should ask him sometime. It seems like it might be important. Igor keeps giving him that strange sympathetic smile. "You must be tired. Please, rest easy."

The Velvet Room starts to fade. Makoto's eyes flutter shut. "Until we meet again," Igor murmurs, and then Makoto is asleep. He stays asleep for two days and wakes up on the twenty-first feeling refreshed and not at all sick.


End file.
